Watch where you link.

December 14, 2001 12:12 PM

Watch where you link. The recent court findings in the DeCSS case apparently included the ruling that linking to a site containing illegal material -- even if it's just to report that fact to others -- is not protected as free speech (and possibly illegal). [NYTimes link; login: metafi/metafi]
posted by mattpfeff (7 comments total)

(Interestingly, from the article, it appears that if you were to provide the address of the site in plain text, and not as a link, you would be protected:

The court began by observing that a hyperlink is not merely a high-tech footnote or reference card that conveys information to a reader concerning the location of additional content. Rather, the court said, a hyperlink contains a speech component and an additional "nonspeech" component -- some computer code -- that has the functional capacity to bring the content of the linked Web page to the user's computer screen at the click of a mouse.
)
posted by mattpfeff at 12:17 PM on December 14, 2001

So... the =two= clicks it would take me to cut and paste means that something different is going on?
posted by meep at 12:23 PM on December 14, 2001

Sounds like it, meep. Don't you love digital semantics?
posted by gramcracker at 12:33 PM on December 14, 2001

I'm relly restraining myself by not posting the code right here. Don't want Matt to get in trouble.
posted by phalkin at 1:36 PM on December 14, 2001

Aww, what the hey. please note that this is NOT a hyperlink.
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/hannum-efdtt-source.txt
posted by phalkin at 1:38 PM on December 14, 2001

what if you just link into a directory where a link may be found? or link to a site where a link may be found? will google have to censor links?
posted by th3ph17 at 2:08 PM on December 14, 2001

what if someone linked to a site that did a redirect? the possibilities are endless... so is the dumbness of this loophole.
posted by lotsofno at 2:45 PM on December 14, 2001