The relevant excerpt from the complaint alleges that Tony Begonja "publishes links to the Plaintiffs' registered copyrighted material and non-registered copyrighted material," and also that he is "publishing deceptively named links which misrepresent and cast the target copyrighted material of the Plaintiffs into a false light." Background on the right to link freely (or not): http://www.tnr.com/online/mccullagh052300.html http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,40850,00.html -Declan --- Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 00:31:08 -0600 From: "The Rev. Tony Begonja" <tbegonjaat_private> To: Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> Subject: FYI: CJ3 finally actually sued me Declan, CJ3 finally actually sued me. See http://www.ind-movement.org/lawsuit/ for info. The EFF helped me get a lawyer. Tony --- [EFF says in its press release below that it is defending the right to link and that the recent Ninth Circuit court decision threatens that right. I respectfully disagree. You can believe strongly in the right to create [a href=""] hyperlinks without applauding Arriba/Ditto.com's custom of displaying remote images from another site via [img src=""] tags. The two concepts are logically distinct. [a href=""] hyperlinking is the backbone of the web; [img src=""] importing and displaying is antisocial. It is possible to limit the latter without affecting the former. I do not claim that all antisocial behaviors of this type should necessarily rise to the level of a copyright infringement, but the Ninth Circuit's reasoning seems reasonably persuasive given current copyright law. Also, there seems to be little reason for Arriba/Ditto.com to import and display the remote image; an [a href=""] hyperlink from the fair-use thumbnail to the original page should suffice. Read the decision at: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/9th/0055521p.pdf --Declan] Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release For Immediate Release: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 Electronic Frontier Foundation Defends Internet Linking Asks Court to Rehear Ditto.com Case San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a brief on behalf of Ditto.com, urging the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a ruling that threatens to make all linking on the World Wide Web a copyright infringement. In order to hold Ditto.com liable for copyright infringement, the Ninth Circuit created a novel legal rationale. It found that linking to a website without permission infringes the public display rights of the website owner. "Extending copyright law to all linking on the Web would be a nightmare," said EFF Senior Intellectual Policy Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "A whole new flurry of lawyer letters would chill linking on the Web, striking at the heart of free expression on the Internet." Ditto.com is a search engine that helps people find publicly available image files on the Web. So, for example, by entering "sailboat" into the Ditto website, the searcher would be shown a selection of images of sailboats from around the Web. Ditto both presented the images in reduced form, known as thumbnails, and also provided links that would allow the searcher to open the full-size image in a new web browser window. Ditto was sued by Les Kelly, a photographer, after Kelly discovered that Ditto had indexed his website and the images found there. Ditto.com prevailed before the trial court, but suffered a defeat on appeal before the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Although the Ninth Circuit found that Ditto.com's use of thumbnail images was allowed under the copyright law doctrine of "fair use," it held Ditto.com liable for copyright infringement for opening a new window to display the image. This technique is known as "in-line linking" or "framing" and is commonly used by numerous other Web search engines, including Lycos, Google, and Altavista. By concluding that these common linking techniques infringe copyright law, the Ninth Circuit has seriously threatened linking on the Web. EFF filed an amicus brief on Ditto.com's behalf, asking the Ninth Circuit to reconsider its decision. The case title is Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., No. 00-55521, decided on February 6, 2002. For documents related to the Ditto.com case: http://www.eff.org/IP/Linking/Kelly_v_Arriba_Soft/ For this media release: http://www.eff.org/IP/Linking/Kelly_v_Arriba_Soft/20020227_eff_pr.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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