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Linking Is Not Copyright Infringement, Boing Boing and EFF Tell Court (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The popular blog Boing Boing has asked a federal court in California to drop the copyright infringement lawsuit filed against it by Playboy. With help from the EFF, Boing Boing argues that its article linking to an archive of hundreds of centerfold playmates is clearly fair use. Or else it will be "the end of the web as we know it," the blog warns. Late last year Playboy sued the popular blog Boing Boing for publishing an article that linked to an archive of every playmate centerfold till then. "Kind of amazing to see how our standards of hotness, and the art of commercial erotic photography, have changed over time," Boing Boing's Xena Jardin commented. Playboy, instead, was amazed that infringing copies of their work were being shared in public. While Boing Boing didn't upload or store the images in question, the publisher took the case to court.
The whole linking debate would be over if Google would just stop showing any links in searches to content from any organization complaining about linking.
The summary got me thinking about "what is a number?" I have heard that argument that you should not be able to patent software because that would be equivalent to patenting a mathematical formula. An image, or song, or any other digital representation of anything, though, is just a number. Can I copyright a number? What about the number 7? The number 5,725,783,997,523? What about 2^4357393-1?
If I can't copyright any of those numbers, then why/how can an author copyright an electronic composition, or how can a musician copyright a digital recording of his or her work, or how can a photographer or artist copyright a digital image? Can a movie studio copyright their CSS decryption key so that they can issue takedown requests under the DMCA? Can I only copyright a number if it is sufficiently large and unique? Can the most recently discovered Mersenne prime be copyrighted?
I am not trying to be obtuse. I am genuinely interested in how people think about this rather complex and interesting issue.
To use an analogy (those always work well, ha) there's a huge difference between saying "this is how pipe bombs are constructed" and "we encourage you to use pipe bombs on people" but linking isn't even that; linking is "here is where you can find a page that tells you how pipe bombs are constructed." To put it another way, it's the difference between giving someone a drug dealer's number and actually dealing drugs. It is insane to consider linking "copyright infringement" especially since the place linked to is completely out of control of the linking party. This song and dance has been played out before.
The Library Linking clauses in the GPL/LGPL are there because the programs rely on the libraries in order to provide some of their functionality.
In the case of the boingboing article, the 'program' is accessing the archive of centerfolds (the library) to provide a key piece of functionality, in this case the definition of how our perception of beauty has changed over time as it related to the female body in adult magazines.
As such, based on the GPL definition of linking, if that definition was based on the legal fundamentals of linking to copyrighted works in written literature, it does in fact cause the boingboing article to be a derived work and thus fall inside the legal definition of infringement.
IANAL though, so someone with a better understanding of copyright law and specific court cases dealing with this sort of issue would be appreciated.