Mom! He's Linking At Me!!!!!

According to C|Net's Declan McCullagh, a judge in Texas has issued an injunction to stop a web site from linking to content on another web site.

Declan says:

U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in the northern district of Texas granted a preliminary injunction against Robert Davis, who operated Supercrosslive.com and had been providing direct links to the live audiocasts of motorcycle racing events.

Lindsay ruled last week that "the link Davis provides on his Web site is not a 'fair use' of copyright material" and ordered him to cease linking directly to streaming audio files.

All Davis was doing was providing a link to a file on Supercrossonline Like This.  Supercrossonline.com has sponsors and they want people to get their eyeballs on their ads which you see all over the place on the Supercross site.

As Techdirt and PaidContent both note, anyone with any experience in building web sites can create a number of defenses against external linking like this.  This is merely a case of a company (Supercrossonline.com) with no idea how to use their own technology.  It's like leaving your door open and suing your neighbor for their cat walking in.

One is forced to wonder if some judges became judges because they truly want to figure out tough legal issues or merely because they didn't like having to do the research to argue from the floor.

Photo by: Dirk Hohndel (The girls, Heike and Sarah are normally very adorable.) 

Technorati tags: supercrosslive, supercrossonline, web design, security, linklove, legal, juvenile litigation

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Comments

[Dirk]

Hey - you're deep-linking ME!!!!

You're very welcome to :-)

/D

[Jim Benson]

Now _that_ is funny.

You made my day, Dirk!