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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.
Deep link from me
And it is goatse you will see
The end.
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?
The Big News Page
How was the guy "steal"ing it? He didn't copy it on his own server. He left it on the plaintiff's server and posted a link to it.
I guess CmdrTaco should get the death penalty for all those links to copyrighted content he posts on this site.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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.
As a general principle, a prohibition on deep linking against the wishes of the linkee is unacceptable because it breaks the net and violates important aspects of free speech. For example, if you want to criticize something that I have posted but you can only link to my homepage, not to the specific post, your ability to criticize is significantly impaired. As far as I can see, there are only three ways in which a deep linkee is hurt: (a) he or she loses ad revenue. Too bad. The law isn't meant to support a specific business model. (b) he or she is not able to ensure that you read other material first. In some cases the motivation for this is good, but it isn't something you can enforce anymore than you can make someone read the introduction to your book before reading chapter 1. At best you can include on deep pages links to higher pages with an explanation as to why people should go there. (c) the linkee ends up paying for the bandwidth consumed by people downloading audio and video.
This last is a legitimate issue. The solution, however, is either to improve the technology to the point that the costs are negligible or to find a way of charging the downloader for bandwidth costs.
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.