inline linking

Hyperlinks are easily one of the most important tools on the Internet. Linking to credible sites that back your site up may give your words a little more heft in the eyes of readers. Getting linked to by a legitimate website is a great way to get new viewers (and if that site is a business you look up to then you might get a little ego massage). For users hyperlinks are even more important. They are the basis of search engines. Without search engines the Internet simply comes to a halt. We’d even venture a guess and say that most of the people reading this right now found this blog post from a hyperlink, not by typing in the website. Not only are hyperlinks indisputably important, many people (users especially) consider them innocuous. Most people don’t even consider them as possible copyright infringements. “Wait, wait…” we hear some of you saying, “Did you just say hyperlinks are ‘possible copyright infringement’?” Yes we did. For those of you who haven’t heard, there have been cases going back to the late 90s about whether or not hyperlinking was considered copyright infringement and, depending on the type of use, some of them were ruled one way, some the other way.   There are Types of Hyperlinks? Indeed there are. It’s not just underlined text that you click on. The types of hyperlinks are defined largely by the things the users can’t see. Regular links, like this one that links back to our home page, has been protected repeatedly. Honestly, most of the time regular links do not come under question at all. Most of the disputes you’ll see in courts are regarding deep linking or inline linking. Deep linking links into the site somewhere. The main difference between the two (because neither search engine rankings or HTTP sees it as any different) is that it’s avoiding a lot of the site that you may not care about. Rather than forcing the user to go through the home page and search through the site, you can just link them directly to what they were searching for in the first place. It’s the difference between taking the subway from one building to another building versus driving through the city yourself. Inline linking is when you use an “<img src=” tag to link one page to another page. It can be useful for visual cues (as opposed to linking through a description) as well as image search engines. Copyright Laws and Linking   Deep Linking Deep linking is a huge deal to some businesses for a few reasons. One of the main qualms that companies have with deep linking is that it can bypass advertisers and some sites even consider it a trespass (as if you were breaking and entering into someone’s house). In Ticketmaster v. Microsoft a judge ruled that Microsoft’s site Tickets.com did not infringe upon any copyrights when deep linking into the Ticketmaster website and that bringing users to relevant content was more useful than harmful. On the other hand, in eBay v. Bidder’s Edge, Inc. it was argued that Bidder’s Edge’s (which is a weird possessive noun to type, by the way) deep linking to eBay was actually detrimental to eBay, according to Linuxinsider.com. Have you ever seen a celebrity get hounded by reporters and paparazzi after a scandal? They hop in the back of their car and it gets swarmed by photographers and microphones to the point where they have a hard time moving? That’s what Bidder’s Edge did to eBay, but with search bots instead of paparazzi. The court ruled that, in this case, the hyperlinks were actually a detriment to eBay and slowing them down. Just think, if they had used a captcha then the entire case may have been completely different. These two cases essentially set the precedent that hyperlinks could be used with impunity as long as it didn’t directly hurt the site (even if the link bypassed some possible advertising revenue).   Inline Linking There are a few cases related to inline linking, but the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier, end-all-be-all, case which all other inline linking cases will be brought back to is Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. Contrary to the idea that the name of the case might give you, Amazon doesn’t matter in this discussion. What matters is another company that Perfect 10 was trying to sue in the same case: Google. The court ruled that Google’s inline linking to their images was not an infringement of hyperlinks copyright because a copy of the image was not made and stored on Google’s servers (whereas when Google does cache a page then sites have the right to have it removed by contacting Google). The court basically set the line where the FBI warning at the beginning of movies does. It’s fine to watch a DVD with a friend but it’s a crime to copy the DVD and give it to your friend.   The European Union’s Decision Recently the European Union decided on a case originating in Sweden regarding whether or not hyperlinks infringe on copyrights. This case is slightly different than any American case due to the way the laws work in the EU. In the EU the rights holders and producers have exclusive rights on how their works are made public. The case originated when a site called Retriever Sverige (an aggregator site like Google News or the Flipboard app) began linking to published articles on the Göteborgs-Posten website in a way that may have implied that the content was that of Retriever Sverige. This caused two questions to be raised: Does hyperlinking constitute communication with the public? Can a site link even if there may be confusion about who is providing the content? The EU ruled that hyperlinks can be used without permission and in any way that the linker desires without the permission of the linked site. The only exceptions to this rule was if either the … Read more