Richard Kyanka's popular Something Awful site hosts a forum in
which a link has been posted to the Apple manual. Apple lawyers
told him to remove the manual from his site immediately. The
Register reports his reaction: "I replied to Apple and
told them basically to screw off because I'm not doing anything
illegal."
Kyanka points out that his site doesn't actually host the manual
on his site. The host appears to be a third party site. The
intention behind posting the link seems laudable: to help fix a
problem that people have had with Apple MacBook Pro computers.
Apple's most obvious course of action is to get the operator of
the third party site to remove the manual. It is probably working
on that. If the manual has been scanned and posted to the internet
without permission, it will be infringing copyright. Downloading
the PDF – which will happen when Kyanka's readers follow the link –
is another instance of infringement. And that's why Kyanka would be
wise to remove the link from his own site.
A
US court said in 2000 that most deep linking will not
amount to copyright infringement. But when linking to material that
itself infringes copyright, Apple can make an argument of
contributory copyright infringement – i.e. it can argue that
Kyanka's site contributes to the infringement of its copyright.
It's the same argument supported by the Supreme Court in the
case against Grokster
and StreamCast: those running a peer-to-peer service might not
host any unlawful MP3 files, but by making it easy to trade
infringing files, the music industry has a right to complain.
Similar thinking was applied by a Norwegian court in a ruling against a
student whose website linked to MP3 files: the student was fined
100,000 kroner (around £8,000) for helping people to find
infringing material.
There are only a few situations where linking causes a problem.
Linking to dodgy material is one of them. Another is when the
linking is systematic, as with news aggregation or 'scraping'
services. But most other objections to deep linking will find
little or no support in law.
By Struan
Robertson, Editor of OUT-LAW. These are the personal views of
the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Pinsent
Masons.
