This is a really disturbing court decision, one that suggests the judge has a flawed understanding of the fundamental nature of the Internet. It’s better than Senator Ted Steven’s understanding, but still deeply flawed nevertheless.
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William Patry (blogauther of “Patry on Copyright”) takes into account all of the points made in the comments, and it is his view that I agree with. See https://williampatry.blogspot.com/2006/12/gentlemen-stop-your-linking.html
Let me play devil’s advocate and ask what the problem is, exactly? If I plastered my website with images that you designed and which were hosted on your server, would you cry “foul”? Sure you would, why wouldn’t you? Media like these webcasts and images are typically seen as residing within a page, rather than being distinct entities. By displaying this copyrighted material (court’s words) on another page, they are essentially passing it off as their own, just as my displaying your images on my site would do. Now if this court outlawed linking to a complete page, then I can see the problem, but that’s not the case.
And as for the “series of tubes”, what’s so wrong with that? It sounds dumb, but it’s a pretty accurate description of bandwidth problems. Within TCP/IP, connections between computers are called “pipes” so why is “tubes” so off base that it should be ridiculed?
It’s not clear to me from that story that the real objection was to the deep-linking. The streaming audio, if opened on the content-owner’s page, played with advertising, right? When opened from Davis’ link, it did not; or at least, not with the advertising that benefitted the content-owner.
That’s not cool, and it reminds me of that “munchkin” image you posted recently Ernie. Why should the content-owner allow someone to link to a file hosted by the owner, which does not give them the benefit of advertising?
I’m missing something, I suspect.
Hmmm. Looks like the guy was representing himself and he was “unaware” of the 2000 case in his favor. A real lawyer might not have missed that one.