To make it faster to load and read,
I made a page for each "case":
Introduction
Copyright and copywrong
"Web piracy"
The N.E.T. Act in the United States
The Church of Scientology cases
The Shetland News hyperlink case
"The day the sites went out in Georgia"
The Digital Object Identifier
Music copyright on the Internet
Are they coming to take me away?
The most recent case
concerning journalists, January 1998
Webography (references)
Procedure (what I did)
On 14 October 1996, four out of seven headlines on the front page of the Internet version of The Shetland News were in fact links to its competitor, The Shetland Times. This of course upset The Shetland Times, since it was their reporters who had written the stories. They went to court and got a temporary ban on the links from the Shetland News.
The link dispute was portrayed in some other media as a quarrel that posed a threat to the very essence of the Internet-the hyperlinks. Without links to other people's pages, there would be no more surfing, since it would become much harder to find new sites to visit. For example, David H. Rothman wrote in The Christian Science Monitor on 3 December 1996: "The wrong outcome could do billions of dollars in damage to future business on the Web."
That is how it was portrayed, but it was not the whole truth. Providing that the Shetland Times has not falsified the example they are giving at their site, it was a rather apparent attempt to get more headlines for the front page without having to pay for the stories. The Shetland News site is said to have more readers and it does have more ads, so one could assume that there is an economic interest in filling the front page.
The problem with Internet-related disagreements is often that once you hear about them, the source of the argument is long gone. But in this case it is not. The Shetland Times has a "live demonstration" of a Shetland News frontpage with links to their pages. (Something which is completely legal, since it is a quote in a discussion.) Three of the headlines were hyperlinks to pages with the Shetland News logo, and four of the headlines were hyperlinks to pages with the Shetland Times logo. The Shetland News never claimed to have written the articles, but on the front page all of the headlines were treated the same.
The resolution in court came on 11 November 1997. The Shetland News was ordered not to link to the Shetland Times without stating that the link was a link to the Shetland Times.
Part of the discussion had focused on the fact that there was no actual copying. The links themselves cannot be subject to copyright. But to present a text in a way that implies authorship could very well be an infringement of the moral copyright-even if the illusion does not last for very long (since the page itself contained the Shetland Times logo).
I have not interviewed the judges or read the reasons for the verdict, but I would think that this kind of link would have been allowed anywhere else, just not on the front page of an electronically published newspaper. In any other context it would certainly look sloppy to put a mere sentence without explanation on a web page, but it is most unlikely that it is illegal.
Today neither paper has any links to the other. Rather than stating that they link to the Shetland Times, the Shetland News do not. Unfortunately for the sake of checking both sides of an argument, the Shetland News site has no comment on the outcome.
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