As I understand the ruling, URLs can’t be copyrighted because they only contain factual and function features. See Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc.(Wikipedia).
That makes sense to me… But what about when I create a link that allows my website visitor to click on the exact same words as your news headline contains, and the link sends them to your news article on your site?
And what if instead I change the headline’s wording a bit, but I keep the meaning clear?
Can you list one case where merely a link forced a website to be taken down by order of a court for copyright infringement?
If you send me to my site (and not to embedded content in your site) I think the case I linked says I can’t complain (legally).
I suppose I could refuse traffic that arrives from a link on your site. That used to be easy to determine. Maybe it would just amp up the battle.
The real problem occurs if you dynamically incorporate my content in your site such that it looks like your content. I’d say that’s infringing of my copyright.
YouTube has implemented their own system called ContentID which is actually more restrictive than the DMCA. They’ll still deal with DMCA requests if they get them (well, they don’t really have a choice), but if your content is being taken you’d be better off using ContentID and YouTube would strongly encourage you to.
What if I use the exact words of your headline? Is that enough content to cause the problem? Or what if I write something that means the same?
Similarly, what if I link to your site using a similar-but-not-identical picture to what you used?
I think that the current caselaw is that the copying is done by the host, not by the client, which would mean that dynamically incorporating content is not a copyright violation. Of course, it might still be a violation of other forms of intellectual property, and hosts are also free to implement technical ways of preventing it from happening.
Mostly because they aren’t running the *same *story but their own versions of it. If the stories are identical it’s normally because they license to use the content, as with the Associated Press or any of the other numerous syndicates. Note that quoting *portions *of the content with attribution is normally fair use. I say “normally” because illegal copying does occur. Even the Dope gets shadowed illegally.
No problem in the U.S.
No problem in the U.S.
No problem in the U.S.
No problem in the U.S.
No problem in the U.S.
It’s probably possible, in principle, for a headline to be long enough to be, itself, copyrightable. But the bounds of just how short a written work can be and still be copyrightable are very murky in caselaw.
You could copy a complete 5,000 word article and stick a link around the whole thing. The violation is in the copying, though. The fact that you stuck a link around it is irrelevant.
The copyright cases kept trying to mush the concepts together but that’s what the courts have rejected.
This is not exactly the same, but here..
The Lighthouse Ministry is a organization set up by a husband and wife team of former Mormons. They were anonymously given the LDS church’s Church Handbook of Instructions, a guide for the lay leaders which is not available to the general membership. The ministry then published some of the material as well as a link to a site unrelated to them which had published the entire handbook.
This is different in that it was not simply a link to legally published material, but a link to material published in violation of copyright laws.
Because of a lack of funds and other reasons, the ministry settled the case, which lead to the court’s decision. The order may not have stood up to full challenge, including appeals to higher courts.
Not even close to being the same thing.
The question on the table is: is it ever a copyright infringement to merely provide a link to a website like this.
Sure. The most famous case in recent memory was when an EU court ruled that linking without permission violates copyright. This has attracted (and continues to attract) a lot of attention on tech sites. I first read about it in 2016 in a story on Slashdot (Linking Without Permission Violates Copyright, Rules EU Court) which helpfully provided links to [, as well as reporting by [url=Playboy wins copyright battle over web links to its images | Reuters]Reuters](]the original court ruling[/url). As of a few months ago, the same issue was still being litigated, this time in the US: the when the popular tech/news/culture blog Boing Boing covered the original story, it reproduced the “infringing” link, and so the rights holders sued them in California. The suit was eventually dropped after the Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped in.
There is a Wikipedia article on the topic of copyright and hyperlinking that lists some other cases, usually involving search engines and news aggregators “deep linking” to stories on newspapers’ websites.
(Sorry for the delay in responding—I had to take a short break from posting due to unfortunate events in real life.)
I thought I’d bump this thread to report on some proposed EU legislation that’s been attracting a lot of news coverage. Article 11 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which MEPs are due to vote on in a few days, would allow member states to implement so-called “link taxes” for news content. These would empower press agencies to assert copyright on and collect mandatory usage fees for hyperlinks to their content. If you don’t pay the fee, you’d be in breach of copyright. (The Article in question seems to be written in a deliberately obfuscated way. Some interpret it as applying to any link to news content, which precisely fits the OP’s scenario. Other believe it applies only to links where the link target is to a news article and the link text quotes the news article, possibly even if the quotation is simply the headline itself.)
A lot of tech law commentators, civil rights groups, and websites that rely on user-generated content are up in arms about the proposed directive, including Reddit, Tom’s Hardware, Julia Reda, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Creative Commons. (I’d provide links to sites in favour of Article 11 but couldn’t find any.)