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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.
Tell that to RMS / FSF, they think linking (with GPL software) creates a derivative work.
(Yes, I know that's a different kind of linking)
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.
Show us on the doll where Boing Boing hurt you.
Tim Berners-Lee doesn't get to decide the laws of a land he is not a citizen of.
Tim Berners-Lee was not "deciding the laws", he was drawing conclusions from the currently-existing laws. But there is a seemingly endless parade of corporations that want to change those laws. The corporations just keep trying again, again, and again. It's been over 20 years, and they're still trying to make linking copyright infringement...