Latest on UK WWW links copyright infringement case

[Tony Barry]

At 09:02 96/11/24, Jan Whitaker wrote:
>[Tony, if this is way off topic, please advise and I will drop out of the
>discussion on this]

I don't think this is off topic but rather fundamental.

I've always regarded  a hypertext link as analogous to a citation of a page
and a URL as analogous to an ISBN or library call number.

By placing material on the web and breaking it up into pages you are
inviting people to visit each page separately regardless of what layer of
organisation you place on the top.

You can force people to get to your material through your own view by
running everything through cgi scripts to remove any persistant URL's if
you want to but it makes the information more difficult to use.

It seems to be that trying to stop people putting links into subordinate
pages at a site is like trying to say you can't cite a particular document
beacuse its part of some kind of set. As a librarian It is obvious to me
the need to provide indexes and catalogues of material to as low a level as
is possible and to have different ones for particular purposes.  If links
were copyrighted this would not be possible as you couldn't set up
independent rating systems or selective indexing of the content of a site.

Not only would tring to restrict links into a site reduce its functionality
it is impossible to prevent.

That is not to say that there is a clear problem of somebody putting up a
site which mainly consists of links to another but presented in a way which
clearly harms the other site by the way the material is presented.  I would
think that legislation other than copyright might apply in this case.


Tony

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