FC: Journalists at risk from linking bans, from the New Republic

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

---
Julie Cohen of Georgetown University law school has a companion piece on 
the same topic:
http://www.tnr.com/online/cohen052300.html
---


http://www.tnr.com/online/mccullagh052300.html

The New Republic
By Declan McCullagh (declan () well com)
May 23, 2000

   Just when you thought there wasn't anyone left in the computer
   business for Microsoft to try to intimidate, the world's biggest
   software company has found a new target: Geekdom.

   Microsoft's legal department recently fired off a nastygram to
   Slashdot, the über-geek destination so popular with the
   cramped-cubicle crowd that it won a write-in Webby award for best
   online community earlier this month.

   Redmond's beef? Simple: Some eleven posts on Slashdot's notoriously
   free-wheeling discussion areas included information critical of
   Microsoft that the company deemed illegal. The lawyer letter, from one
   J.K. Weston, demanded that Slashdot delete the posts or else. The 1998
   Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) mandated it, Weston explained.

   Ironically, the messages were part of an obscure discussion only a C
   programmer could love--a kvetch-fest about how Windows 2000 includes a
   version of Kerberos, an MIT-developed security standard, that's
   partially incompatible with the rest of the computing universe. To
   Bill Gates-loathing Slashdot regulars, the news was an example of
   Gates's assimilate-at-all-costs strategy that's approximately as vile
   as Red China's forcible takeover of Tibet.

   Microsoft's nastygram in response was by and large the usual lawyerly
   fare, except for one demand. "Included on http://www.slashdot.org are
   comments that now appear in your Archives, which include unauthorized
   reproductions of Microsoft's copyrighted work," Weston wrote. "In
   addition, some comments include links to unauthorized reproductions of
   the Specification." In other words, it wasn't enough for Slashdot to
   remove posts containing copyrighted information: hyperlinks to copies
   of the Microsoft/Kerberos documents elsewhere on the Web had to go,
   too.

   Now, it's one thing to demand that verbatim copies of copyrighted
   material be deleted from a website. If a website somewhere on the
   Internet is violating Microsoft's copyright by handing out free copies
   of Microsoft Word, Gates's team of natty attorneys would be justified
   in suing to pull the plug. But claiming that hyperlinks to potentially
   illegal materials are themselves illegal? That's contrary to the
   openness upon which the World Wide Web was built. The principle has
   always been this: You don't need someone's permission to link to their
   website, and in return you're not liable for what they say. A
   hypertext link is like a number in a library card catalog--it provides
   you only with a destination address. If linking becomes criminal,
   though, anyone doing it could be a target: from a disgruntled
   Slashdotter to a journalist covering the story--which is to say, me.
   The Slashdot incident was a provocative Microsoft-versus-Linux tale,
   and I wrote an article about it for Wired's website that day. Under
   the DMCA, Wired articles about something like the Slashdot incident
   could be just as much a violation of the law as the posts themselves.
   Microsoft's lawyers could go after me, or any other journalist, next.

   [...remainder snipped...]

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