Universal: Don't Link to Us
by Oscar S. Cisneros
3:00 a.m. 27.Jul.99.PDT
A Web site that aggregates links to movie trailers online has come under fire from a major movie studio that says the links infringe on its copyrights.
"Every time someone posts something on the Internet it's now for public viewing and most of the time I'm just pointing to the address," said Jean-Pierre Bazinet, owner of Movie-List. "I don't see how you can copyright or make restrictions on posting an address."
Bazinet, whose site features links to externally hosted movie trailers, received a letter from Universal Studios representatives asking him to cease linking to movie trailers on their Web servers.
"[Y]ou are not permitted to link to other sites that contain our copyrighted material without our authorization," the company wrote. "Accordingly, you must remove all images from our films as well as links to other sites that have our servers."
Movie-List's legal scuffling with Universal began almost six months ago when a Universal representative contacted Bazinet and asked him to quit using the movie studio's digitized movie previews. Bazinet had no objections and removed the trailers from his Web servers and CD-ROM collections.
"Then they contacted me and said I wasn't allowed to link to any of their servers containing the trailers -- that I don't understand," he said. "I'm basically sending a user to their servers."
Citing a policy against discussing legal matters in action, Universal declined to comment on the matter.
Legal experts did comment, however, saying the legal landscape surrounding deep linking, or hyperlinking deep into another's Web page, is fraught with unpaved ways.
"The question of deep linking is unsettled in the law right now," said David Hayes, chair of the intellectual property group at the law firm Fenwick & West.
Since no court has ruled on the issue, a guiding precedent has not been established to govern who has the right to link deep into the Web site of another person or company.
Some major Web-site owners contend that because they have a lot invested in their pages they should dictate who can and who can't link into their site. Others, however, contend that they have as much right to direct users to a specific Web page as they do to point out a billboard on the street.
"It's a pretty broad issue because, as you know, linking is ubiquitous on the Web," Hayes said.
Although there are no major court decisions on record, Hayes said a series of settlements in deep linking cases have established a trend. "They were settled by the defendant agreeing to link only to the main page," he said.
For example, when Ticketmaster sued Microsoft for deep linking from its Sidewalk.com site, the software giant eventually backed down. The parties settled out of court, with Microsoft agreeing not to deep link into Ticketmaster's site.
Ticketmaster's main complaint was that users hyperlinking deep into its site were missing several banner ads they would have seen if they had entered through the frontdoor, Hayes said.
"They felt they were getting harmed in their ad revenues -- they weren't getting as many eyeballs," he said. Microsoft, meanwhile, argued its links were a First Amendment right.
Legal experts were watching as Ticketmaster and Microsoft duked it out. Had the companies fought to the end, the decision in their trial might have cleared the fog surrounding the issue.
One expert watching the trial was Jeffery Kuester, an Internet law specialist who maintains his own law and technology resource page called KuesterLaw.
"The Web's not the Web if you can't link," he said. But where the line should be drawn between the right to link and the right to protect one's intellectual property is for the courts to decide, he added.
The trailer links on Movie-List technically point to other servers, but only the URLs mark the pages as studio content. Kuester says the average user is likely to be confused, because the trailers appear to be part of Movie-List's pages.
Both Kuester and Hayes agreed that while HTML originally facilitated deep linking from one scholar's footnote to the original academic source, people shouldn't abuse it.
"I think [Movie-Link's deep linking] does subvert the philosophy on which the Web was founded," Fenwick's Hayes said. He pointed out that although copy machines were designed to make copies, not all reproductions are legal.
Looks like a job for clarity. Interesting, the LA times implies it would be ok for FR to just link and not copy articles and here is a case where even the link is being attacked.
It occurs to me you might use this to show where the big bad evil companies are heading with the copywrite laws. It might encourage a judge to nip it in the bud before the only folks who can share information on line are the big boys.
If a studio has all this stuff on an internet server, doesn't that make it public domain? If they don't want the things linked, don't put them on the server...simple.
I hope to heck this person doesn't buckle. What Universal is doing amounts to restraint of trade and unfair competition. It'd be like trying to tell a taxi driver he may not bring passengers to a particular hotel. This guy should consider a legal action.
Corporations, especially their legal-beagles do stupid things all the time. Years ago the Kodak legal fools were preparing to sue Paul Simon over his song 'Kodachrome'. The Kodak marketing people found out and hit the roof. You can't buy advertising like that, but the idiot legal bean-counters thought they could make a few bucks, blissfully unaware of the PR nightmare such a suit would cause the company. Hopefully the Universal marketing people will reign these leagal idiots in. Only a fool turns down hits to his site,
Only a fool turns down hits to his site You said it. If it bothers them, a good solution is at their fingertips: monkey with the URLs. Imagine this. Every time you get a hit, the web server receives information about the referring page. Let's suppose some fan page is linking to a picture of The Hot Star of the Day from Universal's site. Universal doesn't like that, because nobody sees the banner ad for Clamato that goes along with it, and they don't get the fraction of a cent that would have been generated. No problem. A simple perl script could take note of those resources that are being linked to externally. It could rename the resource automatically, and reset all the links internal to the Universal site. The original resource is replaced by a pointer to the Clamato ad, perhaps with automatic click-through to www.molluskbeverages.com, generating even more revenue. Instead of that hunky bitmap of Leonardo DiCaprio, teenage girls are introduced to the wonders of squeezed fruit and bivalves, generating income without either lawsuits or human intervention.
Universal is nuts. It's kinda like a gas station owner
carping and moaning because someone's building roads to his
business.
That would be much too logical, and besides, what would the lawyers do?
You bring up a good point here - technology, not the law, is the solution to this problem. This would be like telling a columnist that he can't direct readers to a particular page in book.
…teenage girls are introduced to the wonders of squeezed fruit and bivalves, generating income without either lawsuits or human intervention.
[best H. Simpson impersonation] MMM… bivalves … h-h-h-h-h.
Well put. It's like they only want people who stumble onto their site and the specific stuff to see it, or people who think, "Wow, I want to spend time banging around Universal's site until I find just the trailer I want." Please.
In what way are links any different from someone saying, "Hey, there's a great article on such-and-such on page suc-and-such of the So-And-So Journal."
It's tempting to hope that logic will win out here and courts will find in favor of free linking. But then, how often do the courts do what seems logical? Certainly not allthe time.
I think anyone who operates a site and rejects people's efforts to direct traffic to it probably oughtn't be on the web at all.
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Linking on the web a major crime?! . . . Okay, everybody, get out your Free Republic Clue Sticks (TM) and let's give these Hollyweird fools a good going over. I'll bet Bubba's many perjuries didn't bother them in the least. Now suddenly they've taken a stand and donned their law-and-order hats. Never mind no law has been broken. I'm boycotting the slimey buzzards.
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