Copyrights, Intellectual Property and the Internet

5 September 1998

ON LINKS: Note that there are links to many photos in this list. In general, I do not hold any copyrights on these photos, nor have I copied them (except in a few cases with the permission of the copyright holder). I cannot grant permission for others to make copies of these photos.

COPYRIGHT ON FACTS OR COMPILATIONS OF FACTS: This list is in large part a compelation of facts. In  Feist v Rural Telephone Co., the Supreme Court held that, "As applied to a factual compilation, assuming the absence of original written expression, only the compiler's selection and arrangement may be protected; the raw facts may be copied at will." Facts such as names, telephone numbers and addresses are not themselves subject to copyright protection in the United States. Therefore, if you locate a woman wrestler from another directory, an advertisment, or a phone number on a video, and pass that on to me, I can repeat names, phone numbers and similar facts, without infringing the compiler's copyrights, but cannot, in general, repeat original descriptive text. So I can list the name, address and phone number, etc., which you got from another source, and your original description of the wrestler and your match with her, without infringement.

If you are interested in intellectual property law as it applies to the World Wide Web, and in attempts to introduce legislation to change the balance in favor of big business and publishers, at the expense of the public, you may find the following links interesting:

Almost incredibly, a court in Scotland granted a preliminary injunction banning the use of certain links in the now infamous "Shetland Islands case." Although a preliminary injunction in this case means little and establishes no precident, and no decision by a Scottish court would be binding on any American court, the very thought strikes at the entire fabric of the WWW and represents another case of greedy commercial barbarians, newcomers to the Internet, trying to invent or finagle new and unsound law to take over the net for their own commercial advantage. The Shetland Times Ltd have obtained a temporary court order preventing The Shetland News from making free HTML links to pages on their website. If this were to become accepted law, then it would strike at hundreds of thousands of pages now on the WWW, and particularly at sites like Yahoo, that are almost entirely links.

The Shetland Island Case has now been settled, by an agreement between the parties. The following links all discuss the Shetland Islands Case:

Finally, nearer to home CNN, has objected to links from Total News. Here the case may not be quite as clear cut as the Shetland Islands case, because the arrangement frames on the Total News site may confuse the reader about where the content he is reading resides: What is at stake here is that the Shetland Times and CNN are trying to control who can link to their content, where.and how, not by technical means, which is possible, but by trying to stretch the law to make any link without permission a copyright violation. The apparent motivation is to force browsers to view content through designated homepages, and also view the advertising they present. This is contrary to the technology and spirit of the WWW, and seems based on legal arguments invented out of thin air (but we know that lawyers are good at that). Surely, if home taping of television programming for time shifting, which broadcasters opposed because it allows viewers to fast forward through commercials, is fair use, then what the Shetland News and Total News are doing is also fair use, although it's hard to understand where even an arguable copyright violation occurs on their part.

Return to list.