Linking may get a day in court

Wired has a Story on the continuing battle between the RIAA and the web. This ruling could call into question all linking. Remeber a U.S. District Court has ruled that websites can legally provide links to any pages on all other sites (deep linking). The RIAA wants to make it illegal to link to anything that is illegal.

\”If this kind of automated hyperlinking is ruled illegal, the Internet is going to grind to a halt,\” said Ira Rothken, legal counsel for MP3Board.com.

Wired has a Story on the continuing battle between the RIAA and the web. This ruling could call into question all linking. Remeber a U.S. District Court has ruled that websites can legally provide links to any pages on all other sites (deep linking). The RIAA wants to make it illegal to link to anything that is illegal.

\”If this kind of automated hyperlinking is ruled illegal, the Internet is going to grind to a halt,\” said Ira Rothken, legal counsel for MP3Board.com. An RIAA representative said this case isn\’t about hyperlinking at all.


\”This isn\’t about automated versus not-automated hyperlinks, this is about what they know and what they don\’t know,\” said Steve Fabrizio, the RIAA\’s senior vice president for legal and business affairs.


\”This isn\’t the RIAA coming out against hyperlinking. This is about the fact that the sources MP3Board.com are linking to are blatantly pirate sites which they are aware of. They link to sites that say \’Super Pirated MP3s.\’ They even have a genre labeled as \’Legal MP3s.\’\”