Another ruling agianst "deep linking"

greggh · Post by **greggh** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 9:32 pm

Every now and then you hear about an idiotic ruling against linking to "deep" content. Here's another one...

http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-6145744 ... &subj=news

U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in the northern district of Texas granted a preliminary injunction against Robert Davis, who operated supercrosslive.com and had been providing direct links to the live audiocasts of motorcycle racing events.

Lindsay ruled last week that "the link Davis provides on his Web site is not a 'fair use' of copyright material" and ordered him to cease linking directly to streaming audio files.

I suppose that according to this Judge all those links to pages other than to homepages on google are illegal violations of copyright. Google better watch out!

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Fri Dec 22, 2006 8:57 am

Unfortunately a lot of the groundwork for these sorts of rulings was laid in the 2600/Eric Corley dvdcss hearings. It was eventually ruled, after an assload of time in court, that 2600 could not link to sites displaying the dvdcss code (let alone sites that provided binaries). That was a HUGE loss for freedom of speech.

I miss my 2600 shirt that featured Jack Valenti beating the shit out of a linux user who was about to play a dvd on his home box. It got lost when I moved from Cali to NM, I think.