Hyperlinking
Hyperlinking
http://www.chillingeffects.org/linking/faq.cgi#QID710
Question: Do I need permission to link to someone else's site?
Answer: In general, if someone is making a website publicly available, others may freely link to it. That open linking is what makes the web a "web."
In most cases, however, simple linking is unlikely to violate the law.
Question: Is "deep linking" illegal?
Answer: "Deep linking" refers to the creation of hyperlinks to a page other than a website's homepage. For example, instead of pointing a link at http://www.chillingeffects.org, this site's "homepage," another site might link directly to the linking FAQ at http://www.chillingeffects.org/linking/faq .
Further, hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act (whatever it may do for other claims) since no copying is involved. The customer is automatically transferred to the particular genuine web page of the original author. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library's card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.
So far, courts have found that deep links to web pages were neither a copyright infringement nor a trespass.
http://www.chillingeffects.org/linking/faq.cgi#QID710
Question: Do I need permission to link to someone else's site?
Answer: In general, if someone is making a website publicly available, others may freely link to it. That open linking is what makes the web a "web."
In most cases, however, simple linking is unlikely to violate the law.
Question: Is "deep linking" illegal?
Answer: "Deep linking" refers to the creation of hyperlinks to a page other than a website's homepage. For example, instead of pointing a link at http://www.chillingeffects.org, this site's "homepage," another site might link directly to the linking FAQ at http://www.chillingeffects.org/linking/faq .
Further, hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act (whatever it may do for other claims) since no copying is involved. The customer is automatically transferred to the particular genuine web page of the original author. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library's card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.
So far, courts have found that deep links to web pages were neither a copyright infringement nor a trespass.
posted by MITD at
1:35 AM
1 Comments:
Interesting material, I wondered about this many times as well..
how about "component linking" i.e. lets say there is a site with a flash file linked in a HTML page, if one links to the flash file direclty, if that illegal?
Or if one brings another site's page in Frameset of their own site?
I belive as things are changing, greater legal control and policies would apply to such aspects of web.
By
Alok Jain, At
9:18 PM, March 11, 2006
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