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On Tue, 11 Apr 1995 meyer@newslink.org wrote:

> 
> >I've always wondered if this were true from a legal standpoint. Can
> >a company prevent you from establishing a link directly to a page
> >containing headline news claiming it would amount to copyright 
> >infringement?  You might be violating a redistribution clause.
> 
> No. Copyright law does NOT apply to this. The common law tort of
> unfair competition probably would apply. But that's a state matter
> and varies from state to state. Worse yet, it's not covered by 
> the Berne Convention, and thus would not apply internationally.

There are two ways to pass on a link.  One is to become a proxy server, 
which means you copy the page into your proxy's memory and pass the html 
via http to the browser's machine.  This would be a copyright violation, 
since you are copying the publication into the memory of two computers 
for commercial use.

The second method is to use a "tagged referral", which puts 
identification and authentication from one http server into the 
appropriate HTTP fields and passes them to the referral HTTP server.

In the publishing paradygm, the Publisher took the advertizers copy and 
put it into his publication.  In the Web Paradym, the Advertizer/Ad 
Agency server retains the ad copy, and the agent pays for referrals, 
based on who is on the "tag" line.  If a real-estate agent can get 100 
"hot leads", 25% of which result in sales of $100,000 homes at 4% 
commission the net is $100,000.  If the Web cuts the working and showing 
time by 30%, he can afford to pay a nominal fee (say $10,000) for "hot 
referral" advertizing.  The realtor would keep track of who was giving 
him what quality of referrals (came in ready to buy vs. lookie-loos).
The realtor would pay well for quality referalls ($10/hit) and poorly for
the pages that bring in the "lookie loos" ($.10/hit).

As a publisher, you would set up pages that dscribed the joys of living 
in Jersy City :-)and put the referral right under the picture of Journal 
Square at Midnight.  You could turn a slum into a country club.
You don't think real-estate speculators wouldn't pay a king's ransom for 
that kind of marketing clout?

> The analogous situation is a sports bar. It can have a game playing
> on the TV as long as no special admission is charged and the signal
> is readily available outside the bar. If you put a Dilbert file on
> the Web as a GIF, you make it fair game to be linked to be another
Not so fast.  There is a great deal of copyrighted material.  Some of it 
is published under very generous license terms, but MOST is protected 
from unlicensed distribution.

> ERIC K. MEYER                    meyer@newslink.org 

	Rex Ballard


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue Apr 18 18:56:10 1995
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