Here is the opinion of Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee Date: April 1997 Status: personal view only. Editing status: first draft. Links and Law: Myths Myth one Myth: "A normal link is an incitement to copy the linked document in a way which infringes copyright". This is a serious misunderstanding. The ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech to the same extent that speech is free. Making the reference with a hypertext link is more efficient but changes nothing else. When the "speech" itself is illegal, whether or not it contains hypertext links, then its illegality should not be affected by the fact that it is in electronic form. Users and information providers and lawyers have to share this convention. If they do not, people will be frightened to make links for fear of legal implications. I received a mail message asking for "permission" to link to our site. I refused as I insisted that permission was not needed. There is no reason to have to ask before making a link to another site But by the same token, You are responsible for what you say about other people, and their sites, etc., on the web as anywhere Myth Two Myth: Making a link to a document makes your document more valuable and therefore is a right you should pay". This is another dangerous one. It is of course true that your document is made more valuable by links to high quality relevant other documents. A review in a consumer magazine has added value because of the quality of the products to which it refers the reader. I may be more valuable to you as a person if I refer you to other people by name, phone number or URL. This doesn't mean I owe those people something. We cannot regard anyone as having the "right not to be referred to" without completely pulling the rug out from under free speech. Myth three Myth: Making a link to someone's publicly readable document is an infringement of privacy. The "security by obscurity" method of hiding things behind secret URLs has the property that anyone knowing the URL (like a password) can pass it on. This is only a breach of confidentiality of there is some confidentiality agreement which as been made. Conclusions about links There are some fundamental principles about links on which the Web is based. These are principles allow the world of distributed hypertext to work. Lawyers, users and technoloy and content providers must all agree to respect these principles which have been outlined. A reminder this this is personal opinion, not related to W3C or MIT policy. I reserve the right to rephrase this if misunderstandings occur, as its always difficult to express this sort of thing to a mixed and varied audience. Tim BL References 1. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Overview.html 2. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkLaw 3. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Metadata.html 4. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Overview.html David dmorgan@efn.org /David W. Morgan/Honolulu Hawaii Archives Manager --- New Mexico NMGenWeb Project http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/nm/nmfiles.htm http://www.rootsweb.com/~okbeckha/coordinate.html