This is unbelievable - a court in Texas…Dallas no less ruled against a website operator for linking to a ‘audio webcast’ from his own site. It’s stating that the site is liable for copyright infringement and that the site owner had no permission to link to it.
The site owner did not host the ‘audio webcast’ on his own site, he only linked to it. I’m not sure what’s going through this judge’s mind when he made the ruling, maybe he was just too hungry for lunch and didn’t want to really think too much about it or may it’s true with what most people are saying. He may not understand the internet.
The site owner obviously didn’t intentionally let people think that it’s his clip or he didn’t use frames to make it look like it was on his site. On the other side of the argument is that by deep linking, user may by pass advertising that would have been seem if entered through the homepage and any other pages you may need to click on before getting to that webcast, but golly…shouldn’t they ban guns instead?
Anyhow, you can’t see anything on the site Supercrosslive.com anymore since they had to take it off, and I can’t see much on SFX site (if it’s the correct one, it just has errors on most pages) but it could have been that they were linking directly to a source file. So say if you were to take someone source .mov or .gif and instead of linking to their page with the content on it, you link to to the source. Well, even if that’s the case, there are things you can do using server settings to protect that OR you can put interstitials in the clip itself if you are truely wanting advertising dollars. The thing is is this really banning all deep linking? That just creates user unfriendly situations on the web. If everyone had to only link to the homepage, can you imagine that you have to then look for the page that someone might be referring to that is deeply linked? What about google search result. If google were to display a page that’s deep linked, which is of course most of the time, then does google run the risk of deep linking? Up to a certain point, it’s the site owner that should control what people can and cannot have access to.
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