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Judge Rules Against Deep-Linking of Content
An anonymous reader writes "A Texas judge has ruled that, if a copyright owner objects to the linking of content from another web site, that link must be taken down. This case, which may have some far-reaching implications, centered around a motorcross website. The site, run by a Robert Davis, provided links directly to live feeds of 'Supercross' events streaming from the SFX Motor Sports site. The company filed suit, claiming that the direct links were denying it advertising revenue. The article cites previous cases, where sites were prohibited by judges from linking to files which violated copyright law (such as DVD decryption software). From the article: 'But in those lawsuits, the file that was the target of the hyperlink actually violated copyright law. What's unusual in the SFX case is that a copyright holder is trying to prohibit a direct link to its own Web site. (There is no evidence that SFX tried technical countermeasures, such as referrer logging and blocking anyone coming from Davis' site.)'"
The moron chose to defend himself and likened the other party to Ghengis Khan.
Cases are decided on the merits of the argument. If you're determined to enter a stupid argument, you're going to lose - the amount of money either side has or validity of the underlying concept doesn't matter at that point..
Wow. They made the entire Internet illegal.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
The government isn't kept around to guarantee that businesses will make a profit. If these sites want to protect their ad click throughs then they can use techniques like unique per-user URLs or validating that the Referrer field in the HTTP request came from within their site.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
This has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with trying to make more money off ads. The judge should have told the greedy buggers to take care of it on their end if they wanted the cash. In fact, they could have engineered it so that the generated *extra* revenue from those links but sadly they're complete idiots. What bothers me is stupid decisions like this are then regarded as "precedent" when they should actually be regarded as 100% BS.
I like basketball!!1!
In some sense this provides for an absurd definition of the term "public internet". I mean linking is the same as telling someone that something exists. I wonder if I met someone at a party and I said, hey you should check out this link and I just "told" them about the URL, would I be violating the law if the URL's owner objected? What's the difference in speech between telling someone at a party and posting the same info on my blog?
If you don't want your content to be linked to, don't make it accessible through a URL!
...if they don't like it, they should just stop it. By tighting the rules about the referrer header, you can make sure that people browsing your site do so in the exact way you want.
:)
Just look at the more savvy porn sites... they've started using referrers to make sure the images is being loaded from their site, but the more trickier ones are actually making sure that the image you want to look at was first loaded by the detail page that it was meant to be served from. It's made directory browsing terribly hard lately...
But either way, these morons would rather throw money at lawyers, and making people shell over money and such things, rather than tightening the technology of their own house. They define the rules, but with all those front doors openly accessible, they don't like it when people use them.
Many shops have doors out in the back alley... if you don't want people to use it, lock it, stupid!
Copyright is not supposed to protect "your ability to generate ad revenue".
Um, that is EXACTLY what copyright is. Copyright gives you the exclusive right to decide how your "information" is used, whether it is a book, a painting or a website. In exchange for protection, you have to give it to the public domain after a fixed number of years, currently 75.
If I write a book/website/etc, I have every expectation that you will not go sell photocopied versions of it without my permission. I wrote it, I get to decide how it is distributed and profit from it.
If not, then wtf do you think copyright is FOR?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
So, now linking to a publicly-accessible file on a web server is a copyright infringement? What if I simply publish the URL on my site but without the hyperlink? What if I publish the URL of an "unlinkable" file in the newspaper? How can telling people the LOCATION of information infringe on the rights of the copyright holder?
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And bringing a lawsuit (against one individual) is cheaper than turning on referrer logging (which solves the problem in perpetuity for all leeches)? What colour is the sky on your planet?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The basis for things like copyright, as explicitly stated in the Constitution, is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." As such, copyright must be designed to do that. If you disagree, you're necessarily claiming that copyright is unconstitutional.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
And bringing a lawsuit (against one individual) is cheaper than turning on referrer logging (which solves the problem in perpetuity for all leeches)? What colour is the sky on your planet?
What's your point? That principle should mean nothing? That the only structure we should have in place to stop people from ripping you off is a physical barrier to their ability to do so? How about a more open situation where most people are reasonable and don't rip you off, and you tell the few people that do to knock it off, and when they say "screw you," you have some recourse?
You're advocating an arms race, and I'm advocating a civil society.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
IF someone includes a link in their writing to what is supposed to be a specific item of interest, but cannot because of rulings such as this one, they're forced to leave a link to the home page of the web site instead. Does anyone honestly think users are going to waste their valuable time trying to locate the item of interest being referenced by the writer? When I'm confronted with these kinds of links, the very next click is on the "close" button.
This is nothing like that. Whatsoever. It's a stupid simile. The difference is that a URL or other network stream that permits connections without checking to see who you are is like a building with an unlocked door. Sure, it might be rude for someone to come inside, but in a lot of jurisdictions, it's not even illegal if it's your personal residence. They're not trespassing until you tell them to leave - this is true throughout the state of California, and "NO TRESPASSING" signs have repeatedly been shown to be useless. Now, if you lock the door, that's breaking and entering. But on the internet, there is no zoning. Any given IP address could be a vanity site, or a private computer, or a web server. So to the user, every open port that will provide data makes a machine look like an open business, and you are meant to walk through the door.
Now, to continue this bullshit, just because I can enter a building doesn't mean I can walk off with the contents. Whether the door is locked or not, taking things that don't belong to me is theft. (Let's not get into a copyright infringement discussion here. This isn't meant to fit the digital world perfectly.) So just because a port is open doesn't give you an excuse to be a jackass. On the other hand, a web server or streaming server that does not have any access control is an open invitation to receive the content. If there is a shit lock on a door and you bypass it, that still takes you up to breaking and entering. The same should be true of the digital world and as far as I know, it is in some ways, but only because it helps to establish intent.
Making a video stream publicly available is much like broadcasting a TV station in some ways. It pretty much comprises an invitation to receive it. It's unlike it in other ways, which is to say that when you broadcast a radio signal, it costs you the same to send it regardless of the number of subscribers, but the IP network doesn't work that way in spite of the promises of multicast. But this doesn't mean that we need additional legislation; it means you should be more careful. If you don't want people coming through your door, lock it. Period.
Another breakdown in your analogy is that using access control you can effectively stop people from deep-linking your content. You can require that people have a valid cookie before they can download your content, or you can do referer checking, or take any of a number of other options up to and including checking access rights and then tweaking firewall rules to permit access to the video stream. You have a vast variety of methods available to you to combat deep linking. The only way you can control access to your outlet is physically. Of course, if your external outlets aren't on their own circuit, then you have very serious problems - that is a truly idiotic design.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your logic is heavily flawed. It would be much more like this situation if the guy was embedding their videos on his page. However, he was linking to them. That would be like you putting up a Christmas decoration, and your neighbor putting up a sign, saying ``Look at the decoration next door'', and as a result of this, the concrete next to your house getting worn, and you having to pay to fix it. Can you sue your neighbor for this?
One can argue that the patent and copyright systems are all about the government securing profit for businesses and individuals.
There are plenty of non-profit people and organizations that still make use of their copyrights. Not least so that other unscrupulous people can't make money off of their volunteered time, etc. Everyone has those rights to their own work, whether they're personally choosing to make money or not.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I just want to combat some misinformation I've been seeing.
Linking, at its most basic level, is not stealing. It's not even copyright infringement. A link is merely a reference to an existing resource. Nothing more. By linking to the PDF of your book on your website, I'm no more infringing your copyright than if I told someone where to find a free copy (perhaps in the free box of a yard sale.)
A lot of individuals seem to think that anything that prevents them from making money from their work is inherently a violation of their copyright, but I'm sorry. The internet just doesn't work that way. If you want to protect your work, put it behind some kind of basic barrier (a login, a CAPCHA, something.) Then you can sue deep linkers under the DMCA for circumventing your copyright protection mechanism. A blanket ruling stating that any webmaster can object to and remove a link to any "deep" (read: non-home) page on his site is just a bad idea. Many website TOS's already (unenforceably) forbid deep linking. If this ruling spreads, any website that generates ad revenue, or relies on branding, will start adopting similar language. And since that constitutes about 85%* of the useful web, this is unquestionably bad.
Some people can't seem to understand the role deep linking plays in the useful web. Almost any informational article or resource of any length references very specific pages on other websites. This type of thinking will eventually require any web developer to do careful research on any website he wants to link to, checking their TOS policies to find out if deep linking is illegal.
Now, one slightly more rational view seems to be that one can safely deep link, and need only remove links when a content owner specifically objects. Other more disturbing views insinuate that a web developer should "just send an e-mail" before he establishes a deep link. This would turn every website article into an arduous process of research and documentation, cataloging permission for every link in every page.
Eventually, this will lead to the web being broken down into mostly web sites linking to the homepages of other websites. References in articles will become like this (Click on Articles, click in the search box and type 'Pandas'. Go to page 3, click the 3rd article from the top ('Panda Lifecycle'.) The search results may be different, so you might have to hunt around.)
If you disagree, you obviously don't understand the nature of the web. To those of you who argue that "everyone should just be reasonable", nobody is ever reasonable when it comes to money. And believe me, the web is now very much about money.
Now, I'm not talking specifically about this ruling, which may or may not embody all of the above ideas. I'm speaking more to the concept of conflating deep linking with theft, and many of the ideas and beliefs which have been espoused in this thread. The bottom line, this is a technical problem that requires a (simple and inexpensive) technical solution. Attempting to involve the courts will only harm the useful web.
* Source: My Ass
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
The judge can't simply ignore the law!
Au contraire. Judges do it all the time. The only thing (besides their conscience) preventing them from ignoring the law is one of the parties bringing up what the appropriate law is. Then that party is eligible to appeal the judge's ruling should the judge choose to ignore the law. If neither party brings up the law, the judge is free to do whatever.
Basically, you need a lot of money to pay for people with experience, training, and good acumen at branch prediction to defend or prosecute your case. It takes a whole lot of logical pressure to get a judge to rule in your favor if they are not so inclined by their own biases. Be especially careful when suing any government entity. Today's judges, at least those on the Federal courts, are generally more conservative that they have been in the past and so tend to say government corruption is okay so long as it serves the government to be corrupt. The modern conservative movement is interesting that way -- it seems to want to make the government look bad by allowing the government to be bad.
If there's no law against him linking to content, then regardless of how stupidly he argued his case in court, he should still have won the lawsuit. The judge can't simply ignore the law!
A judge isn't paid to know every last law on the books. A judge is paid to know how to weigh up separate legal arguments as they are presented to them and conduct additional research if they deem it appropriate.
The content owner presented the argument, "This is my content. He is circumventing the means I have put in place to control access to it. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act says that any attempt to circumvent access control is against the law."
The idiot defended himself with, "But! But! He's Ghengis Khan!"
The judge didn't ignore any laws that were presented to him. He considered the arguments presented and sided with the coherent one.
Now, had the idiot argued that, "The DMCA applies to circumvention of encryption. This was not encrypted and so that argument is invalid. This guy put his content on the net and I linked to it via standard internet norms. That he wanted people to walk down only one path to his content, so he could profit better, doesn't change the fact that another commonly used path existed that he made no attempt to secure." he might have won. Had he hired a lawyer to put many years of training on how to skillfully craft that argument, he'd have been even more likely to have won.
The fact remains, the judge did exactly what judges are supposed to do - he weighed up the arguments as they were presented to him. That the idiot failed to present a cohesive argument means that, yes, he should have lost under the way the U.S. legal system works.
Now you can argue that judges should be required to be case law experts on any case they hear...
Think about that for a moment. Consider the breadth of case law out there. Consider how lawyers already specialize in specific areas because knowing every area, even if you just have a good grounding and do research in specific cases, is all but impossible. Do we want specialist judges? It's a great ideal. But now consider the cost to every county that have to provide separate divorce judges, patent law judges, business law judges, etc. Now a county needs twenty or thirty judicial variants to support what you're asking for.
How do they pay for this? Well, so far, court costs get passed on to the loser. Slashdot readers regularly bitch that the massive cost of losing already makes a legal defense impossible for the common man to risk - hence things like the RIAA settlements. Do you really want to make this situation even worse?
Yes, in an ideal world, everything would be perfect: Judges would be experts on what they heard and the pure, fabulous truth would be all that mattered - and it would somehow all be for free. Back in the real world, a tradeoff has to be made. To ensure realistic access to justice, that balance point has been chosen as: Judges aren't expected to be case law experts, they're expected to weigh up arguments well. You can hire a lawyer to ensure your argument is well presented.
It's not perfect but it's the best system anyone's come up with so far. Under this system, yes, the guy deserved to lose.