Slashdot Mirror
Landmark Canadian Hyperlink Case Goes To Supreme Court
An anonymous reader writes "Vancouver businessman Wayne Crookes is trying to reverse a decision by BC Supreme Court judge Stephen Kelleher that linking is not the same as publishing. He's been given permission to appeal it to the Supreme Court of Canada. If he wins, it could mean the end of the net in Canada and will reverberate around the world. 'The notion that someone might be considered a publisher merely by linking to someone else's content, I think could have a potentially huge chilling affect [sic] and, for that reason alone, is going to have a major impact on the shape of the Internet in Canada,' says Ottawa law professor Michael Geist. Hyperlinking is what the web is all about, says p2pnet founder Jon Newton. 'Without it, the Internet would become a drab and pale facsimile of the exciting news, data and information medium it is today. Instead, each item would be isolated from every other item, and online defamation lawsuits aimed at anyone and everyone with a Web site would instantly become commonplace.'"
> " Instead, each item would be isolated from every other item, and online defamation lawsuits aimed at anyone and everyone with a Web site would instantly become commonplace."
Actually, what would happen is everyone would host their websites offshore in nations with looser copyright laws, and the Internet would become increasingly decentralized as larger, "legitimate" players are isolated, and independent, "less legitimate" players circumvent legislation and continue to link.
Ironically, this will *hurt* big media.
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Actually, I think that the courts pretty much demonstrated good understanding of technology in the first judgement.
It's normal that the plaintiff should have a right of appeal - that does not mean he'll win, or that the appeal court does not 'get' the Web.
This case hinges on whether or not linking is publishing, which - under the admittedly fairly bonkers rules of English-based defamation laws, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation), determines whether or not someone has been libellous, (since we're talking about the written, rather than the spoken word).
In the initial judgement, the Court reasoned, "...hyperlinks...are analogous to footnotes, rather than constituting a 'republication.' "
In other words, he did not repeat the libel, so no case.