Is Brian Whitaker breaking the law?
The Guardian, 9 July, 1998
VISITING the BBC's Web site, I can scarcely believe my eyes. Underlined, next to a story about Yemen, are the words "Yemen Gateway". A link! They have linked to my site!
Revelling in this moment of glory, I print outthe pagefor posterity, then click on the link. For a second time, I can scarcely believe my eyes.
They have linked to the left-hand navigation panel - which is a stupid way to enter any site that uses frames. When viewed without frames, it produces a screen consisting almost entirely of blank space.
This is like entering a house through a bedroom window when the front door is open. Why they didn't link to index.htm, which not only follows the naming convention for home pages but also sets up the frames, baffles me. Perhaps I could sue: a crazy link from the BBC certainly exposes my site to public ridicule (a classic test of defamation).
While still seething about this, I went along to the 1998 Netmedia Cyberlaw Lecture where Nick Lockett, a barrister, was giving a talk entitled: "To link or not to link?" This struck me as a bizarre question, because without links there would be no internet.
As it turned out, the issue is not whether you can lawfully link, but how. There are dangers, for instance, if you link to another site in a way which cuts out its advertising, or if you cunningly use frames to associate your own ads with someone else's pages.
Few sites do that, but there is also a question mark over the widely-used technique known as "deep linking" (when you link directly to a page on another site without going via the home page).
In general, deep linking seems both reasonable and in keeping with the information-sharing spirit of the internet. My own site, for example, has direct links to articles about Yemeni history on other sites. There is no point in linking to the home pages because they contain a lot of irrelevant material and readers might not find what they are looking for.
The trouble starts if you mislead people by giving the impression that the linked material belongs on your own site. In practice, though, most internet users are probably canny enough not to be fooled by that.
My site also links to maps of Yemen held by an American university. These files are large - up to 333k - and rather than invite people to spend time downloading them without any inkling of what they may get, I have included thumbnail images of the maps on my site. But is this a breach of copyright? After swotting-up on the law athttp://www.patents.com/weblaw.sht, I think not; it can be defended as "fair dealing".
As far as I know, Yemen Gateway is totally legal - though so few cases have come to court that it's impossible to be sure. Before Mr Lockett's talk, I had always imagined that if I did transgress, I would apologise and put it right. But now I know better.
Cyberlawyers move fast … they go for the service providers and get offending domain names removed. Faced with a choice between retaining a customer who spends around £100 a year and fighting a case which could thousands, most service providers will ditch the customer.
Mr Lockett's average time for closing down a site is six hours - though his record is 23 minutes from the initial complaint. My nightmare is that one day I'll come home from work and find that Yemen Gateway has been de-webbed.
Still, there's one bit of good news. A visitor to my site last week bought two books, earning me $3.48, which should pay for about 15 nanoseconds of professional advice from Mr Lockett. Not enough, I suspect, to induce him to de-web the BBC.
FEEDBACK:
- Mitch Harris- Linking solution. 9 July 1998
- Rob Norman- Frame problems. 9 July 1998
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