Will Tim Berners-Lee be indicted for complicity?
A German member of Parliament has been discharged of a lawsuit concerning a hyperlink she published on her Web's homepage. Angela Marquardt, 25, elected in the Bundestag as a member of the leftist PDS party (former CP of Eastern Germany), linked her homepage to a left-wing magazine's web site, Radikal, hosted in the Netherlands. German prosecutors argued that Marquardt, with the hyperlink, gave her support to Radikal's views. The magazine was outlawed in Germany last year because of an article explaining how to sabotage railways in order to protest against nuclear waste convoys (see lambda 3.03). A Berlin Court, however, said the link was installed well before Radikal was declared illegal. But it did not rule if such an hyperlink could be considered as an explicit complicity for accessing illegal material online.
Legal battles concerning online copyright infringement and other illegal activities thought to circulate on the Web have been revealed for a long time. But there is another form of infringement that is less known: "at the heart of the problem lies the hypertext link, the very thing that makes the Web powerful", reported Kurt Kleiner, in the January 25 issue of the British weekly New Scientist, in an article titled "Surfing prohibited."
A series of law suits have emerged recently. Lambda sums some of them up:
Just before the Supreme Court decision to block the CDA, a District Court in Georgia declared a bill passed in July 1996 unconstitutional. HB-1630, known as the Police Bill, was meant to amend the "Georgia Computer Systems Protection Act." Among other things, the bill sought to ban all Internet communications where people are not well identified, and urged people to get written authorization for linking "to any individual name, trade name, registered trademark, logo, legal or official seal ...." The bill was defeated thanks to the Electronic Frontier Georgia and the ACLU. "Georgia's law [was to be] enforced by any of more than 200 jurisdictions, county, city, etc," said EFGA's Robert Costner before the court's decision. Georgia State's Attorney General had promised not to prosecute while the decision was pending, Costner told Lambda.
Excerpts from HB-1630:
A legal battle still pending concerns criminal accusations by the Software Publishers Association that ISPs were co-liable for allowing users to create homepages that contained hyperlinks to pirated software sites. One of the sites affected, Tapu, was censored by the owner's ISP and was immediately mirrored elsewhere. No court has yet ruled whether a hyperlink could be considered as criminal an activity to pirate software. The SPA has, so far, decided to stop its major lawsuits.
In France, "warez" resources are said to have been at the heart of a conflict between Mygale, a free-hosting service, and the French Ministry of Education. Mygale was created by a graduate student and used the Internet bandwidth of his university to launch the service. At one point, the server had as many as 6,000 users. Renater, the public academic network, said certain sites housed on Mygale offered access to pirated software resources via hyperlinks.
In Scotland, a lawsuit brought by a weekly newspaper, The Shetland Times, lead a British Court to ban the Web-based news service Shetland News from linking to the weekly's Web site. Jonathan Wills, editor of the Shetland News, said recently that the appeal "will not get a full court hearing until October 16, almost a year after The Shetland Times won a temporary court ban. ... Lawyers for The Shetland Times indicated, at a brief Court of Session hearing in Edinburgh [early in June], that they would persist in their argument that 'hypertext links' between one Internet publication and another are a breach of copyright -- unless the publisher of the World Wide Web page in question agrees to them."
The New Scientist revealed a similar story in New Zealand, although it was not challenged in Court. The Web-based news service 7am received a complaint from Independent Radio News (IRN), because 7am published a list of news links in which one of them, Xtra, buys special New Zealand News Wires stories from IRN. IRN claimed that 7am was itself required to pay a special fee for publishing the Xtra link.
7am's publisher advised readers of its copyright policy thus:
Frames? Yes, frames. These special Web features initiated a lawsuit against Total News, a service that offered a series of hyperlinks to the most famous Web-based news sites on the Internet. Six big plaintiffs (Cable News Network, Inc., Dow Jones & Company, Inc., Reuters New Media, Inc., Time Inc., Times Mirror Company et The Washington Post Company) sued Total News on February 20 at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and argued that it breached copyrights by showing the distant site in a frame, where graphical environment of Total News remained. A settlement was found on June 5, in which "TotalNews is allowed to provide a "clean," plain-text link to the plaintiffs' websites, but is not allowed to frame them. For example, a user who clicks on TotalNews's hyperlink for the Washington Post now will go straight to washingtonpost.com without any frames, images, or other content being superimposed by defendants."
However, it seems that MSNBC and other non-plaintiffs were always framed in TotalNews... (picture above).
Another HTML feature, called "inline link," was at the heart of a series of copyright lawsuits brought last year by United Media, publisher of the well-known American comic strip Dilbert. Dan Wallach, a postgraduate student in New Jersey at Princeton University used, like many other Dilbert's fans, an inline link in order to publish every day the strip put online by United Media. A page with the inline link brings up the image file on that page. Thus the link did not bring people on United Media's Web site. The "hack" was possible because United Media always published the daily cartoon at the same address: "http://www.unitedmedia.com/ comics/dilbert/todays_dilbert.gif". Now, this address is no longer active.
The company threatened to sue everyone running that kind of link. All except Wallach, who decided to fight because he was not making any copy. "The question is, am I allowed to instruct your browser to do something that the other site doesn't want it to?," he told The New Scientist. Wallach eventually agreed to remove the link, because he lacked the money to sustain his argument in court.
As an example, and purely for educational purposes, Lambda here presents what an inline link look like (an image of Princeton Cemetery that Wallach posted on his Web site):
The HTML code is written as such, with arrow-parenthesis instead of brackets: {img src = "http:// www.cs.princeton.edu/ ~dwallach/dilbert/ cemetery1.gif" ALT="Princeton Cemetery" ALIGN="RIGHT"}