The UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is seeking public comments on the freedom to link to online content. From the solicitation page: 'The DTI is seeking the views of UK business, consumers and other organisation’s on whether Article 12 to 14 of the Electronic Commerce Directive (which limits the liability of intermediary service providers where they act as mere conduits, caches or hosts of information), and which were transposed into UK law by the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, should now be extended to providers of hyperlinks, location tool and content aggregation services.' For more detail, see the DTI consultation document on the issues. Comments are due on September 9.
Also see the position of the Association for Information Management (ASLIB): 'It is not the case that the [EU Directive 2000/31/EC] forbids hyperlinking, or that there is any proposal to forbid hyperlinking, or any licensing thereof for copyright reasons. It is the case that we do not know what is permitted, and currently that could only be decided by the courts....We believe the laws should be clarified to reduce the uncertainty, given the generally accepted importance of the web, and given that this Directive aims to encourage and develop web activity for the common good. Take the worst case scenario, that it was decided that the EU Directive on ecommerce were interpreted to mean that including links to external web sites on your web site and in your emails was in breach of copyright, and that either you couldn’t do it without permission, or you needed a licence (probably with a fee). How would that affect your service? What would be the effect on your customers and user communities? What would be the impact on our nation’s education, business, health and social activities? How would this affect the knowledge economy? It cannot be argued that this worst case scenario will definitely come about. Equally, there is no absolute guarantee that it could not, given that it would depend on court decisions....In order to support our submission, we need examples from YOU about the service you provide, the benefits to users, and how these would be affected if you could no longer include hyperlinks, or if you had to seek permission, or obtain licences to do it.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/03/2005 03:05:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
