Actually, the “right to link” has nothing to do with the link economy. Links are just citations and the right to cite predates the web. The right to cite, to say “see NYT, January 14th issue, page 6″ is a precondition for any sort of free speech/press.

Except that that is NOT what Jarvis has said.

Crawlers is how search engines find things.

Links are references/citations to content.

Yes, search results pages have links, but they’re not the only pages that have links.

Of course, Ticketmaster/Citysearch (now IAC) bought Sidewalk soon thereafter, which could have influenced the settlement. But “deep-linking” (how quaint!) spawned lots of controversy and legal action back in the day. I just wonder if any of those decisions would have bearing on today’s controversies.

Everything old is new again.

They are using redirect pages. It’s not direct link, or 301
Therefore they are not passing the PR, the link is NOT followed by any crawler, and they are NOT contributing to the linking ecosystem.

See for yourself : http://www.newsnow.co.uk

This is what Google sees : http://2a00:1450:8002::84/search?q=cache:HNnQzLlVJCoJ:www.newsnow.co.uk&hl=en&strip=1

If I take the first link : http://www.newsnow.co.uk/A/397076307?-4007

It goes through a /A/ page, where you have a final redirect to the target site.
But : http://www.newsnow.co.uk/robots.txt
/A/ is DISALLOWED.

The PageRank isn’t properly flowing through those links. Bots aren’t attributing the links to the sources.
It is not a FAIR usage of links.
If they call for the “right to link”, they should at least do it properly…

Yes, they have. However, US courts have also said that you can’t print nuke secrets or pornography, yet no one seems to think that there’s no freedom of the press. (In the past, they’ve also said that the wrong organizations can’t print political speech, which I’d argue is a violation of freedom of the press. If the NYT and GE, through NBC, have a right to political speech, it’s unclear why Home Depot and I don’t.)

WRT Murdoch, we’re not talking about linking to pirated content. We’re talking about linking to his sites for his content. (I am assuming that he doesn’t pirate.)

So here are some links, that without the right to link, you wouln’t see

A Question for John Yoo, and American Prospect Censorship?

Presumption, not disdain,moves the Debate

And my challenge to Super Freakonomics Author Steven Levitt

Oh really? What US law or court says that I can’t provide a link to the NYT for content owned by the NYT?

A responsive answer consists of a checkable citation that fits that fact pattern, not a vague assertion or a case with a different fact pattern. Of course, Levine is free to reply as he sees fit.

The “hot news exception” has made it very clear that while you may be allowed to say “Thom Friedman thinks the world is flat” you cannot say “Bloomberg is reporting that GE stock just went up 2.25, click here for more” or “AP reports that there was an earthquake in Haiti,”

That’s what news organizations need to shut down, or wind up getting shut down.

The point is that many people, such as Jeff.J. have been arguing, “if you don’t like links, then just tell crawlers not to.” So someone follows his recommendation, and now he gets all bothered by it.” Stick to your recommendations, I say

Andy, *I* do not disagree. U.S. law disagrees. The courts disagree. Reality itself disagrees. If you want to know more, read the law. If you still disagree, bring a court case. This is the way it is.

Jeff, you should stop spending so much time deleting my comments and spend more time reading the law yourself.

Yup.

If I link to the NYT’s site for some NYT content, how, exactly, does that link interfere with the NYT’s copyright?

If a reader clicks that link, the reader goes to the NYT to get the content. The NYT is then free to handle that request as it sees fit, just as it is free to handle any other request for that content.

That’s a good example because the link publisher isn’t running the program, the reader is. Moreover, the link publisher isn’t doing anything that makes the link “work”, and can’t do anything to affect how the content owner handles the request.

A link publisher is providing a program that makes it easy for a reader ask the content owner for content. That request is no different from any other request for that content by that reader. As a result, linking does not affect the content owner’s ability to place conditions on the distribution of said content, to restrict its availability, or to monetize.

Levine seems to disagree, so let’s get specific.

Suppose that Jarvis requests a piece of Levine’s content by clicking a link and I request the same piece of content by typing that link’s href into my browser’s address bar.

What, exactly, can Levine do with my request that he can’t do with Jarvis’ request? What can he do with Jarvis’ request that he can’t do with mine?

Yes, Jarvis’ request may have a different referer than mine, but Levine is free to do what he wants with the referer. Which is good, because Jarvis and I are free to send whatever referer we’d like. (Yes, referer is misspelled in the HTTP standard.)

Wrong.

Adding links to something that you’ve copied without permission does not transform it from plagarism and theft to aggregation.

Aggregation is simply combining and distributing content from a number of sources. If that combining and distribution is done without permission, it’s plagarism. If it’s done with permssion, it isn’t.

Links aren’t content – they’re citations.

I agree that we have a big problem if folks don’t understand how links work.

I’ve been pointing out that we do have that problem, that many of the folks who object to links don’t understand how they work.

They make demonstrably false claims like “links steal content”. They claim that links are aggregation. They claim that links are something new.