Are There Legal Limits To Web Linking?
N E W Y O R K, May 13 -- It's time to test your knowledge about the Internet.
Let's say you own a climbing store and decide to sell gear online. You trymake the site look good by linking to photos of famous mountains you foundelsewhere on the Web. Have you broken the law?
Before you answer that, try another question. To further interest the Websurfers who visit your site, you provide links to articles about mountaineering from other sites around the Internet. Is that illegal?
To the consternation of some observers, a recent federal court ruling in San Francisco has called into question some basic linking practices — and demonstrated the extent to which the legal status of links remains undefined, even though they have been the essence of the World-Wide Web since Tim Berners-Lee developed it in 1989.
"There's never been a definitive legal ruling" about linking, says Fred VonLohmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco, who favors unrestrained linking. "There's still a lack of clarity."
Court: Thumbnails OK …
Many of the concerns of groups like the EFF stem from a February ruling inSan Francisco, in which Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that a searchengine's style of linking to photographs was illegal.
Les Kelly, a professional photographer, brought the case against the ArribaCorp., then-owners of Ditto.com, a visual search engine that catalogs photosfrom the Web. Kelly argued that by showing his work on its site, Ditto.com had violated his copyrights and damaged his ability to sell them over the Web.
In its ruling on Kelly v. Arriba, the appeals court found that Ditto.com could show the reduced-size "thumbnail" versions of photos, saying the smaller format diminished their aesthetic value to the point where they were not competing with Kelly's originals. But it ruled that Ditto.com could not display his full-sized images on its site.
"By giving users access to Kelly's full-sized images on its own Web site, Arriba harms all of Kelly's markets," stated the ruling.
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