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)
In 1996 the state of Georgia passed a bill that would make it illegal to link to another web site without the permission of that site, at least if you were using trademarks like a company name or a logo. This trademark oriented view of the Internet is, as I said earlier, on its way out.
Such a ban would naturally be completely impossible to uphold without shutting down the net. A search engine would, for example, not be able to display search results without asking permission from the listed sites first.
The law was ruled unconstitutional in 1997, along with a New York state law that was similar to the Communications Decency Act (CDA). States cannot make laws about something that takes place outside their borders.
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