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COPYRIGHT LAW
Do you want to know more about copyright law when applied to linking? Imagine that a telephone "Yellow Pages" lists you AND also lists people or businesses that you don't like. You have NO authority to call the manufacturers of the telephone book and demand that you be taken out of their book. They'll smile, tell you that your name, phone # and address are public information and you'll have to pay EXTRA to be disincluded. Copyright law is pretty clear when it comes to telephone books and also clear when it comes to linking. The only court cases that have even been HEARD on the subject was one where Microsoft was deep linking into another site and another where a website opened other sites in a frame - neither of which I do and both were settled in favor of the linker anyway.
RESEARCH IT YOURSELF
Direct quotes referencing linking and copyright law:
"In effect, the HREF link merely provides the browser with the Internet address for a new page. Providing this address to an end users web browser should be no more an infringement than providing that web address in written form (as would appear in a newspaper article). The provision of this type of information is similar to providing a library user with the Library of Congress (Dewey Decimal ?) location for a book already in the library. The address is itself is pure information, and is not protected by copyright (see the BitLaw discussion on ideas for more information) or by any other intellectual property regime."
"Links are simply addresses designating the location of a document. Therefore, Mary is not committing either direct or contributory copyright infringement."
"Plaintiffs in several recent court cases have claimed that unauthorised hypertext linkages infringe the intellectual property rights of the owner of the target material. Such claims could potentially chill the robust development of hypertext networks. However, such claims of legal liability based upon theories of copyright, trademark, or false designation of origin appear to be unfounded. When properly analysed against the operation of hypertext linkages, none of these theories of liability offers a sufficient ground for excluding such links."
"The URL is essentially a location or identification number referencing a file somewhere on the Internet. Considered as a location, it seems unlikely that the URL can be subject to copyright protection by anyone, let alone the author or owner of the material referenced by the URL. As indicated above, ideas, facts, and short phrases cannot be copyrighted (United States Code Title XVII, s.102(b)). Because it is in essence an address, the reference is not the proper subject of copyright: it is simply an indicator of location, which is to say, a fact. If the reference is not copyrightable, then inclusion of it in a document cannot be infringement."
"However, under the copyright law, the user's act of linking is unlikely to constitute infringement because it is probably protected either by an implied license or under the copyright doctrine of fair use."
"Linking then, in the absence of other wrongful conduct, is unlikely to constitute either copyright or trademark infringement."
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