"Remove links from your site to ours"--paraphrased

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Injury

Lifer
Jul 19, 2004
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As long as you aren't stealing their content you are doing nothing wrong.

Post their letter on your site but be careful not to give them any fuel for a libel case.
 

aidanjm

Lifer
Aug 9, 2004
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"Whistle BlowerEli Lilly Zyprexa Litigation

EFF is defending the First Amendment rights of a citizen-journalist to link from a public "wiki" to electronic copies of damaging internal Eli Lilly documents relating to the controversial prescription drug Zyprexa."

this case is a bit similar. maybe you should email the electronic freedom foundation and ask their opinion..?

http://www.eff.org/

a web link is an address, and since when has it been illegal to publish an address? if this newspaper wants to prevent people from reaching their site from your site via links, it is a trivial matter to implement. But I can hardly believe they can legally force you to remove a web address from your site. In fact the very notion is outrageous.

"Imagine if you couldn't include excerpts from your sources in your research reports, or you couldn't include a quote from a politician in your editorial about an election. Despite strong legal protection for these types of activities, bogus copyright claims and other intellectual property threats can still have a chilling effect on speech.
For instance, only a year prior to the 2004 presidential elections, a group of students and activists published on the Internet internal memos suggesting that electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold knowingly distributed flawed e-voting machines. When Diebold used specious copyright claims to force people to take the memos down, EFF fought back?successfully defending the publishers and winning damages for copyright abuse."

http://www.eff.org/Censorship/

If you have a right to include extracts from sources in your writings or reports, then surely you have the right to include a simple address.
 

aidanjm

Lifer
Aug 9, 2004
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chilllingeffects has some good info on linking
http://www.chillingeffects.org/linking/

including this FAQ
http://www.chillingeffects.org/linking/faq.cgi

"Question: If a hyperlink is just a location pointer, how can it be illegal?

Answer: It probably isn't, however, a few courts have now held that a hyperlink violates the law if it points to illegal material with the purpose of disseminating that illegal material:

- In the DeCSS case, Universal v. Reimerdes, the court barred 2600 Magazine from posting hyperlinks to DeCSS code because it found the magazine had linked for the purpose of disseminating a circumvention device. (See Anticircumvention (DMCA).) The court ruled that it could regulate the link because of its "function," even if the link was also speech.

- In another case, Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry, a Utah court found that linking to unauthorized copies of a text might be a contributory infringement of the work's copyright. (The defendant in that case had previously posted unauthorized copies on its own site, then replaced the copies with hyperlinks to other sites.)

- By contrast, the court in Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com found that links were not infringements of copyright.

Like anything else on a website, a hyperlink could also be problematic if it misrepresents something about the website. For example, if the link and surrounding text falsely stated that a website is affiliated with another site or sponsored by the linked company, it might be false advertising or defamation.

In most cases, however, simple linking is unlikely to violate the law."


so simple linking, alone, can't be seen as illegal. there might be problems if you are linking in such a way as to suggest you are somehow affiliated with the organisation you are linking, or if you are linking to material that would be illegal to download. but just linking a news article for discussion wouldn't be problematic. Why are your blog users just linking to one news source, tho?