Hello Friends:

>.. Now we have this - a Utah judge decides that the mere posting of URLs
>contributes to the piracy of the pages and therefore contributes to, and
>thus is, copyright infringement.   Maybe our resident editor (Ron?) might
>know a little more about this?

Copyright law is being batted about by the Web. The nature of a
medium that shares information with links demands that links be
permitted -- but the author/publisher of information does still
control its use and republication. (If they object to your link, you
gotta take it down.) The only successful way to keep your Internet
materials from being linked to, or republished, is to put them behind
password-protection. I'd expect that this issue will be going before
the US Supreme Court before too long.

It continues to amaze me that some news providers consider it just
fine to republish links to stories from other news organization
sites, just adding a little summary of the article -- and then call
this something like "Latest HP News."

Fair Use law lets you reprint up to 50 words of anything, so long as
you quote the source.

If you're interested, there's a pretty good First Amendment handbook
on the Web which I turn to:

http://www.rcfp.org/handbook/viewpage.cgi

It's operated by the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press,
and includes a copyright section.

I'd expect that Eugene Volokh, VEsoft's shining technical light who's
now a professor of law at UCLA and has clerked for Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor, might be able to shed some light on this question.


Ron Seybold, Editor In Chief
The 3000 NewsWire
Independent Information to Maximize Your HP 3000
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