Wired has a Story that scares the hell out of me. In an unprecedented expansion of traditional copyright law, it is no longer merely illegal to distribute a potentially infringing computer program — but now even linking to someone else\’s copy could be verboten. You can now break the law by linking to DeCSS.
Related Case.
\”I think that Judge Kaplan does not know his head from his ass,\” says Adrian Bacon, owner of Linux News Online. \”Outlawing a site from linking to another site that has DeCSS is just plain wrong.\”
Wired has a Story that scares the hell out of me. In an unprecedented expansion of traditional copyright law, it is no longer merely illegal to distribute a potentially infringing computer program — but now even linking to someone else\’s copy could be verboten. You can now break the law by linking to DeCSS.
Related Case.
\”I think that Judge Kaplan does not know his head from his ass,\” says Adrian Bacon, owner of Linux News Online. \”Outlawing a site from linking to another site that has DeCSS is just plain wrong.\”
More From Wired
:\”It\’s bad enough that this decision diminishes the expressive character of this code,\” says Paul McMasters, the Freedom Forum\’s First Amendment ombudsman. \”But it extends far beyond that to threaten the ability of those writing about DeCSS to even link to the code. That puts this ruling in league with recent legislative attempts to slap a prior restraint on speech that links.\”
The U.S. House of Representatives currently is considering the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act, one version of which makes it a crime for anyone, including journalists, to knowingly link to drug-related websites.
\”Even if there is no First Amendment right to put up the source code, there is a very strong argument to include the URL to anything you please,\” says Eugene Volokh, a UCLA professor who teaches copyright and free speech law.
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