________________________________________________________________________________ /* see: http://rolux.org/archive/show.php3?message=434 */ Wired News Only News That's Fit to Link by Declan McCullagh 3:00 a.m. Aug. 23, 2000 PDT WASHINGTON -- Internet journalists, beware: A recent ruling by a federal judge could imperil your ability to place hyperlinks in some news articles. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan last week surprised few courtroom observers when he sided with the motion picture industry and ordered 2600 Magazine to delete a DVD-descrambling program from its website. But almost nobody expected Kaplan to agree with Hollywood's request to ban the hacker-zine from even linking to the DeCSS utility. Kaplan's ruling, legal experts say, appears to be an unprecedented expansion of traditional copyright law. No longer is it merely illegal to distribute a potentially infringing computer program -- but now even linking to someone else's copy could be verboten. That could create legal problems for reporters and editors at sites like Wired News, Slashdot, and CNET's news.com, who have included links to DeCSS in news stories as part of their coverage of the lawsuit. "I think that Judge Kaplan does not know his head from his ass," says Adrian Bacon, owner of Linux News Online. "Outlawing a site from linking to another site that has DeCSS is just plain wrong." Bacon said that Linux News Online does not advocate illegal acts, so he will "make reasonable efforts to not directly link to a DeCSS site." The Motion Picture Association of America did not respond to requests for comment. But in a strongly worded statement earlier this summer, MPAA president Jack Valenti made it clear where he stood: "(2600 publisher Eric Corley) is transporting individuals electronically to locations in order to facilitate the illegal copying of DVDs. His behavior is analogous to driving someone to a home so that they may burglarize the home." Efforts by copyright holders to ban links to sensitive materials are on the rise. In May, Microsoft demanded that links to a copy of its Kerberos source code be removed from a discussion forum. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints successfully sued to bar a critic from linking to copyrighted church handbooks. Another example: Toy-maker Mattel, which sold Cyberpatrol blocking software, recently wanted to rid the Internet of a program that descrambles the program's secret blacklist of off- limits websites. Instead of suing only websites that distributed the "cphack.exe" program, Mattel also threatened journalists who linked to cphack with legal action. In March, a Wired News reporter received a copy of a temporary restraining order and a subpoena from Mattel. Because of a settlement in the Mattel case, that federal judge never ruled on whether such restrictions would be legal. That leaves Kaplan's decision as the first one that appears to restrict hyperlinks by a news organization. "It's bad enough that this decision diminishes the expressive character of this code," says Paul McMasters, the Freedom Forum's First Amendment ombudsman. "But it extends far beyond that to threaten the ability of those writing about DeCSS to even link to the code. That puts this ruling in league with recent legislative attempts to slap a prior restraint on speech that links." The U.S. House of Representatives currently is considering the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, one version of which makes it a crime for anyone, including journalists, to knowingly link to drug-related websites. "Even if there is no First Amendment right to put up the source code, there is a very strong argument to include the URL to anything you please," says Eugene Volokh, a UCLA professor who teaches copyright and free speech law. The lawsuit against 2600 also is the first to test the reach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Congress passed at the behest of the entertainment industry. One part of the DMCA restricts the distribution of programs that can circumvent copyright protection. In his opinion, Judge Kaplan ruled that DeCSS qualified as a circumvention tool -- so even links to it should be off-limits. His ruling could apply to Internet news sites in two ways: - It gives the movie industry a non-binding precedent to point to if they bring lawsuits elsewhere. Another related lawsui is pending in Connecticut. - Perhaps less likely, it could give the studios a way to lodge contempt-of-court charges against news sites. Kaplan ruled that anyone "in active concert or participation" with 2600 may not knowingly link to copies of DeCSS. In its separate but similar case, Mattel publicly claimed that a similar injunction applied to people running websites who had no contact with the defendant. Volokh says neither of those outcomes is likely, at least right now. "But in the long term, there's a serious problem," he says. "If these cases become precedent, then all sorts of things newspapers publish they won't be allowed to because it makes them aiders and abettors, or co-conspirators, or whatever else." For its part, 2600 simply removed the links to copies of DeCSS. But they left the non-HTML versions of the addresses intact, so visitors can simply copy and paste them into a browser window. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38360,00.html ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. post to the list: mailto:inbox@rolux.org. more information: mailto:minordomo@rolux.org, no subject line, message body: info rolux. further questions: mailto:rolux-owner@rolux.org. home: http://rolux.org/lists - archive: http://rolux.org/archive