Slashdot Mirror
Deep Linking Troubles Continue
Glothar writes "There is a case currently before the US court system (somewhere) based on one web site linking to content (trailers and other fun stuff) within Universal Pictures' web site. Universal is basically saying it can not be done. There is an article on Wired about it. Basically, they want it to be a copyright infringement. In reality, they are upset because they want everybody to have to look at advertising. However, it may make the URL I just gave you a copyright violation as well. Ironic. " Proof once again that the old school business world has a lot to learn about
the Internet.
The thing that really disturbs me about this is that it sort of defeats the whole point of the internet: To get information as quickly and easily as possible. If there is one thing I can't stand, it's getting a link which says, "See the new trailer of XYZ here", and then I have to jump through fifteen more hoops, or use another sites search engine to find the page. If I get routed to the front page, and the thing I am looking for is not there, I'm outta there. I'm not going to flip through five more pages of advertisements to get it. It's kind of like neighboring cities saying, "I don't want you linking to my city without first routing all traffic down Main Street so that they can drive by all our tourist attractions. I'm not going to look at all of the tourist attractions. I'm going to say, "I need to get the hell out of this town and never come back again."
I just don't get it. I can see why Universal might be upset about images used on the site, but links? You can't copyright a URL, only the information contained on that URL, far as I'm concerned. Where does this leave internet directories like Yahoo!? Could they be considered illegal as a result of this as well?
All Universal is concerned about is its ad revenues, nothing more.
paranoid.android
...maybe things will get done. /. why don't we tell them what we think?
They have a feedback page for you to send them email about whatever you want (except creative movie ideas). If we go there and tell them that they can create a script or something to block or redirect unwanted links, then maybe we can avoid this legal battle. Instead of talking about it over here on
IANAL, but I play one on
It's time for the studios and media to wake up and realize that the public isn't their bitch anymore.
By the way, Universal, do you plan on releasing anything resembling a good movie in the near future? Or do you intend on blowing all your dough on legal battles?
What's the problem with preventing links to your server? A lot of sites stay up because of loading images as advertisements. If you link through to that, the content owners may not get the money. I bet if I linked to Slashdot without loading up any of the graphics, thereby causing Rob and pals to lose out on cash while still having to server the page, /. would have a hissy. And rightfully so. Second, a link can be very damaging to a server. I used to run a small ftp server which I used to let my friends get sounds and files from my University-networked machine. Someone on the outside with a lot more hits then I got decided to link to my sounds, and BOOM - saturation. I was plenty pissed. Finally, there's a real important point here - this is UNVIERSAL's content. If they don't want anyone linking to it, then no one should. Intellectual Property, people - if you want their product/service, do it their way or not at all.
Instead of suing them, its not that freakin' difficult to write an Apache module (and presumably a module under any other server) that checks the referrer and not serve the requested file if the referrer isn't on the local site.
Keeps people from using your images and crap like that.
The copyright infringement thing is just silly, but I can understand why they don't want people doing that. Its easy enough to fix technically...
So, they will subvert the whole point of the world wide web, and we will eventually build something new for them to "discover."
Sorry, I'm crabby today. If you don't want people to link to your stuff, DON'T PUT IT ON THE WEB!
--
Washington DC - After more than two years in and out of the courts, The Supreme Court today upheld the lower courts' ruling that the viewing of a website in any other layout and format other than the one set-up by that site's authors.
The original suit was brought by a cartel of web business all over the country, initially sponsored by by the Direct Marketers Association (DMA). The defendants were Junkbusters Inc and thirty-four other businesses and individuals who had created software to let users by-pass blinking pictures, pop-ups advertisements, and intended controls on font, color, size, and backgrounds.
This means that the lower courts' previous award of seventeen billion dollars is due immediately. Upon hearing the ruling, Junkbusters immediately filed for bankruptcy, but it is widely believed that their the software authors and corporate directors will be personally liable. Furthermore, the text-based web browser, Lynx, is now illegal to use except on your own sites, as are any proxies that filter or rewrite incoming webpages in any way, including the suppression of blinking text. Both Microsoft and AOL Microsystems must immediately issue mandatory patches to their browser to disable the users from being able to disable automatic loading of images or moving GIFs.
A joint statement issued by the not-for-profit American Association for the Blind and the International Epileptics Support Center decried the decision as essentially barring their members from the web. The DMA praised the decision, stating that ``the needs of Commercial Enterprise would no longer be stymied by Communists and other PBS and NPR sympathizers.''
President Gore also weighed in with his pleasure at the decision, adding, ``This just blasted away the roadblocks in my Information Superhighway. Next term, we're going to the stars!'' This appeared to be an oblique reference to his constituents' efforts to gather re-election funds through click-through advertising fees. The president was in closed conference this afternoon with top members of Congress and with his InfoBahn Czar about how soon they could implement a new mandatory A-chip to be placed in televisions and VCRs so TV and video advertisements could no longer be avoided by consumers through editing, muting, fast-forwarding, or channel-surfing.
A hacker squad known only as the Spamvert Amnesty League (SAL) briefly seized control of the Whitehouse website, where they replaced the campaign advertisements with malicious notices of revenge against all spamvert supporters everywhere. At the same time, a digitized parody video of Clockwork Orange appeared on the Fox channel's satellite download in which consumers were held prisoner as commercial advertising was blasted into their propped-open eyes and ears. Credits on the video listed the SAL, and their choice of the European anthem, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, has led authorities to look in Europe for their homebase, since as we all know, uncounted intellectuals, artists, anti-commercial socialist sympathizers, and other commie rats have long taken refuge there from the righteous wrath of invasive American Plutocracy.
What the typical slashdot-I-didn't-read-it-but-I-have-a-comment crowd doesn't seem to understand is that this isn't HTML pages that this guy is linking to. He is linking directly to the Quicktime files. On top of that he makes no mention as to where the files are actually coming from.
This is an extremely sleazy thing to do in my opinion. I wonder how he would like it if slashdot linked directly to his http://www.movie-list.com/smalllogo.jpg image whenever it posted a movie story. I think this guy would get really pissed at the amount of traffic this would generate on his server. Bandwidth usage = $$.
Now, that being said, Universal did not handle this correctly. Calling in the lawyers will not fix their problem since I could easily post the same links to newsgroups, etc.. They really need to look for a technology solution. Heck, I can think of at least twenty pr0n sites that would be able to give them a clue.
In any case, both sides screwed up. If we end up having some clueless legal precedent set by this then BOTH parties should be blamed.
I'm inclined to blame movie-list more on this one. Universal has already talked to them once before and from their point of view this new stuff could look pretty spiteful. I still don't think they should have called in the lawyers but I understand why they did.
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
There's something inherently slimy about linking directly to content rather than to the original page that contains it.
It's intellectually dishonest, in fact. It's not the stubbornness of old media saying this, it's everybody but the pants-less newcomers in love with the idea of content free for the taking. Even if it's not truly free. Merely linking to pages is perfectly acceptable: that's what the web is about. By linking to pages, not content, you provide the originating site with due respect, earned revenue and earned visits, publicity and promotion, increased identity and branding. You provide your visitors with the full experience and an opportunity to view an item in context. Withholding context is like hit singles: what is the rest of the album for? Why did the creator spend all the time and effort and money? Shouldn't the opportunity for immersion be offered?
When I see what I consider stolen links, there's always a sense of unease, discomfort, and dislike. Part of it is that these sites keep poor company: the worst offenders are porn sites, warez sites and the banner-laden pages of wimps with puny get-rich-via-banner schemes in their heads. But it's also because it's unfair, unreasonable, arrogant; it's the maneuver of the stupid and the cowardly, the uncreative, the lazy, those lacking in judgment and intelligence, the pimples on the ass of humanity.
If you wish to include an excellent trailer or movie or gif, provide your users to the link of the page of the owners of that content: your site gets credit for the referrer URL, your site becomes and avenue for path-making to other sites and your site still is given credit for the new information by your visitors.
Where are the rules of gentlemanly and gentlewomanly conduct that guide most of us? They should apply here, too. It feels wrong to link to images on another site. At least, it should.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
But the basic problem is, I need absolutely no license to link to anything on anybody's site. The only possible exception is if I electronically "sign" an agreement (like you do with the NY Times site). If I don't have to do that, I can refer to the data however I care to.
The mundane equivalent to deep linking is referring or footnoting. If somebody publishes a book, and I access it (buy a copy and read it), I have the right to give referential or navigational data to anybody I care to. I can tell you that the good stuff is in figure 38 or page 182. I simply can't give you figure 38 or page 182, but I can tell you where to get it. This interferes with no copyright law, since I am copying nothing.
Per the above book-based example, ownership of content does not imply ownership of its locational metadata. That is all a URL is; locational metadata.
The fact that the end user sees it as a copy of the information is an illusion. The reference (URL) gets interperted by the browser, and the data is retrieved. This is only possible because the data is publicly accessable (not public domain).
This is like me referring to a publicly accessible book (say, one that is in libraries). The difference is that the browser will actually search the stacks and retrieve the book for you--all under the covers.
A LINKING document might be usable for politeness, stating the terms that one should link up. However, such a document should not carry the force of law. The legal precedents all flow the other way.
--The basis of all love is respect
Okay, just for the moment, let's say that the Old School, typewriter-using, book-reading, litigious, proprietary, work-20-years-at-the-same-company people are right and that it's wrong to link to content on another site.
First off, I need a definition of what is a "deep link" vs. a shallow link, but I digress.
So... all the benefits of the web and hyperlinking get categorically thrown out the door beucase linking directly to content "steals" the right of the website to throw garbage in your face.
Well, what about search engines, then? They're nothing but "deep links". They steal *everyone's* content and make money by forcing ads to be displayed while they hawk other people's stuff.
(so, by not having a robots.txt file, do you grant consent to have your content snatched up?)
I think that we're approaching a time when the old-school and new-school will have to come to some concessions about the way the world works. How do you enforce one country's law on international users and content that may originate from any country or no country?
And.... if search engines are guilty, then I'm 100% certain that ALL portals except for opensource-content ones are violating the same rules.
I'm sure things will get worse before they get better. Technology is much more advanced than the laws that govern it. Just look at how complex US law is, and then look at how little of that law relates to regulating modern technology.
Fear the US Lawyers who have free cycles to "port" all their progress-stifiling regulations to high-tech!
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for justice and rule of law, but when law gets so complex and obfuscated that nobody understands it and it takes months to interpret it, something's gone awary.
Wow 182 post, I'd be suprise if anyone actually reads this.
Anyway, I just skimmed the comments and I didn't see anyone mention this (if you did, I'm sorry for being redundant). But is it a copyright infringement if I make a deep link with a book mark. I mean I'll just go directly to the location. Or is it just a problem if I make my bookmarks available publically.
Anyway I believe that ANYTHING that is published on the net is worthy of being pointed to by a link. If you don't want something linked to, then have users create accounts (free like NYT). Or have some sort of CGI script to point to the information that dynamically changes.
So much for writing this since I don't think I'll have a soul to read it
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Ain't it grand?
You make "making money" sound like a bad thing. Frankly, it is a laudable goal.
Like everything else, there is a right way and a wrong way to make money. The right way (per capitalism) is to increase your wealth by increaing your customers' wealth. Take a car company for example. They increase their wealth by selling me a car. I increase my wealth by buying it; I lose money, but I gain the wealth of the ability to go 40 miles without breaking a sweat. The companies that can make their customers the wealthiest (the most prestigious car, the cheapest car, the most maintenence-free car), tend to come out on top. This is what capitalism is all about.
The wrong way is to get money from somebody else without giving him anything back. Extortionists and muggers do this. You can argue that peddlers in addictive drugs (or addictive operating systems) do the same.
BTW, not understanding the Internet is not about making money. Not understanding the Internet is just about incompetence. If you take two similar companies, and only one understands the Internet, it has a competitive edge. Ignorance in a capitalism is self-correcting; the ignorant tend to either get illuminized or replaced. The fact that it hasn't happened yet simply means that Titanics don't turn on dimes. Inertia only takes you so far.
--The basis of all love is respect
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
You could always detect that case too, and let them through. Media Player probably passes a different user agent string to the server.
:)
Or you could detect IE5 and just transparently redirect them to Netscape's download page.
This is all quite silly. I can go to a library and do an infotrac search (equiv of web search). It returns a list of articles matching my search criteria. I then go to the newspaper archives, go to spool 9/1994, and zip to page 5A, column 3, paragraph 4 (equiv of deep link) and read my article. I do not see the advertising there either. How is this different from what web search engines do?
I have one that seems to not block most ads, but does nuke the ones on slashdot. (Which is good most of the time, because that silly adfu.blockstackers.com is what keeps slashdot from working half the time)
I have a proxy that runs on the fast side of my frame line and gzips everything before sending it to my browser, makes my 56k work like a T1... Somehow it breaks the ad stuff on here though.
I've seen commercial programs that specifically block domains that ads are served from, though.
Wouldn't be hard to write one.
For one thing, it's a free speech issue. If I can't link directly to another site, can I post the url in plain text and let people paste it into their location boxes ? If I can't do that, can I send a url to my buddy with the url in it as a link ? as plain text ? Can I publish a book with the url in it ?
The fact is that the trailers are publically accessible resources for which the poor defendant is simply publishing the location. If Universal doesn't want the resource to be publically available, they should make it so (as other posts have indicated), rather than throwing it up there for anyone to look at and then trying to legally prevent people from speaking about where it is and how to get to it.
Sites typically WANT the hits so, why not post a LINKING page that is akin to the COPYING document used for the GPL?
The LINKING page could give explicit license to link to the page as long as certain criteria are met - any violation of the criteria voids the license immediately and may cause litigation.
The first site linking to the second site could get monetary compensation for LINKING under license in order to provide incentive to link; the threat of being sued would be the disincentive to link improperly.
One of the criteria might be that contact with and permission from the administrator of the site being linked to is imperative.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I forgot who said that originally (Barlow?), but it's something that needs repeating in cases like this.
HTTP and HTML were not designed to force people to view advertisements, they were designed to share and link information. If you don't like the limitations of a technology, don't use the technology.
The culture of the net says that the right to link is implicit. If you don't like the customs of a people, don't enter their territory.
Now, it is a bit dishonest to deep link into someone else's site without attribution, but it can't be illegal. For the courts to allow ownership of the address of a copyrighted work would make most periodical indexes, card catalogues, bibliographies, and footnotes illegal.
Universal published their content on the web with no access restrictions. If people go to that content and download it, I don't see a problem as long as the referring site didn't misrepresent the actual source of the content. A previous article on /. discussed displaying someone else's site in your frame with your advertisements. This wouldn't be OK, because in a way that misrepresents the source of the content. But if the Movie-List says "Go get movie trailers from Universal", then no one is deceived and I don't see how Universal can complain. Apparently in this case Movie-List didn't list the source of the content, so their case isn't as strong. But if the source is attributed, I don't see a problem.
As another poster mentioned, there's no reason that Universal can't set up a technical solution - generate random URLs for each visitor, only serve the content to browsers referred from one of their sites, etc. But if they make content freely available on the 'net with no access restrictions, I don't see how they can complain if people download it. What if I just typed in a random URL and happened to hit one of their trailers without going through their site?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
So this idiot writes a threatening e-mail to me because his site wants to refer people to my site (bus schedules) and keep a frame up top with their advertisements in it. Their reasoning is that they are driving traffic to my site, so they have a right to show advertisements around it. They are upset that I won't allow that.
Clueless idiots. Of course, if he had any brains, he could write a LWP perl script to just grab my content and embed it into his pages.
So the same with Universal. Plenty of technical solutions to prevent your pages from being pirated, as well as to pirate other pages.
But no, let's fight this out in court... :(
This reminds me of a ruling in Norway. The case was brought by a University against someone telnetting to their sendmail daemon and doing some other investigation (as part of a TV show) and it turned out the University was running known-security hazardous versions. The Norwegian courts said: If you don't want anyone to visit, *don't* open your ports.
:)
Hopefully we can have similar results in the "Land of the Free".