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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