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December 21, 2006 5:26 PM PST
Judge: Can't link to Webcast if copyright owner objects
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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.
The audio Webcasts are copyrighted by SFX Motor Sports, a Texas company that is one of the largest producers of "Supercross" motorcycle racing events. SFX sued Davis in February, noting that fans who go to its own Web site will see the names and logos of sponsors including wireless company Amp'd Mobile. (Anyone who clicked on the link from Davis' site, however, would not see the logos of companies that paid to be sponsors.)
While Lindsay's decision appears to be the first to deal with direct or "deep" links to Webcasts, this is not the first time courts have wrestled with the legality of copyright law and direct links.
In 2001, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled that a news organization could be prohibited from linking to software--illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act--that can decrypt DVDs. "The injunction's linking prohibition validly regulates (2600 Magazine's) opportunity instantly to enable anyone anywhere to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted movies on DVDs," the appeals court said.
A Dutch court reached a similar conclusion in a suit dealing with someone who had allegedly infringed Scientology's copyright scriptures, as did an Australian court in a case dealing with pirated MP3 files.
But in those lawsuits, the file that was the target of the hyperlink actually violated copyright law. What's unusual in the SFX case is that a copyright holder is trying to prohibit a direct link to its own Web site. (There is no evidence that SFX tried technical countermeasures, such as referer logging and blocking anyone coming from Davis' site.)
A 2000 dispute between Ticketmaster and Tickets.com suggested that such direct links should be permitted. A California federal judge ruled that "hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act" because "no copying is involved."
Davis, who was representing himself without an attorney, defended his Web site in legal filings that were full of bluster and accused SFX of acting like Genghis Kahn. He did stress that he merely included a "hyperlink, which launches the visitor's media player" instead of copying the audio file and republishing it.
That wasn't enough to convince the judge. Lindsay ruled that: "SFX will likely suffer immediate and irreparable harm when the new racing season begins in mid-December 2006 if Davis is not enjoined from posting links to the live racing Webcasts. The court agrees that if Davis is not enjoined from providing unauthorized Webcast links on his Web site, SFX will lose its ability to sell sponsorships or advertisement on the basis that it is the exclusive source of the Webcasts, and such loss will cause irreparable harm."
See more CNET content tagged:
Webcast,
copyright law,
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Texas,
motorcycle
Link to my page? GREAT! Steal my files? Go to jail (or else pay me.)
internet makes such sweeping rulings.
It is easy enough to prevent a deep link. Many companies
already do it (the porn industry probably depends upon it).
The ruling of this judge will likely have long term, chilling
consequences that were never considered, especially given that
it is so easy to circumvent the issue. This issue should never
have even come up in the courts.
It's obvious the property owner is compensated for the use of it's property via ad revenue and Davis' direct link results in consumption of their product (and bandwidth) while bypassing the revenue mechanisms the owner relies on.
To make matters worse, reviewing an archived version of Davis' site shows that his site derived revenue via ads on his site resulting in him profiting from his actions. So, he took revenue from the owner and then generated his own revenue from the owner's property. Kinda shoots down the whole noble, "I'm helping promote the industry." approach.
All of this could have probably been avoided if he had linked to the page hosting the WMA file instead of directly to the file.
I agree the owner should have better mechanisms in place to protect it's property, but not because of some made up rules about how property is handled on the web, but because of folks like some of those in this forum who believe if you can access it, then it must be free and you can do whatever you want with it.
It is actions and thoughts like these that give the lawyers ammunition to go after our real fair use rights for most copyrighted material.
I am not a web designer but I believe security is possible. One of things that first blew me away about the internet (years ago) was that you can come to a link by any number of ways. It is nothing like a book or a library. Home page is rarely the first page anyone visits. I came to this story via rss feed on netvibes to boingboing to cnet. Aggregators are everything to the web and to the this decision.
If you want to keep ability to access webpages/objects from a multitude of ways I think the ownership for security and access to any web object >has< to fall on copyright owner. Otherwise, (I agree with the previous post) that search engines and aggregators are dead.
With this decision you are left with having to prove that the web page/object "should not be" unaccessable and the user "should have known". A house is four walls and by concensus, private. A website, as a communication tool, is by it's nature intended to have some sort of audience and therefore you must secure what is private or intended to viewed in a specific way.
A previous comment mentioned that just because you leave your door unlocked doesn't mean that others have a right to take your property. That is not a valid analogy.
A more appropriate one would be to equate a website with a public business. Imagine you have a cool widget that others will want to see. Instead of charging admission you choose to sell ads on your walls. So you have a pathway that you want your customers to walk down, viewing these ads, before reaching said widget.
Now, say I know of a shortcut in your business that allows others to bypass your hallway of ads. Is it wrong for me to tell others that shortcut?
If I were the business owner, I would make sure that there were no shortcuts, that my clients could only see the widget by following a path of my choosing. I wouldn't be suing someone for divulging shortcuts in my own place of business.
See the entry on Karin Spaink in the Wikipedia.
Arel