vincevincevince - 12:45 pm on Jan 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

Look at it in a precise and technical fashion. Ignore preconceptions about what has happened here and find the corpus delicti - the actual evidence that some offence has actually taken place.

1. The defendant used his computer and copied a string of not more than 50 characters from one web page owned by the plaintiff and pasted it into a website under his own control.
2. The defendant also typed some text describing what would be found by those following the link - that text was not copied from the plaintiff and so can be safely disregarded.

Where, therefore, has copyright violation taken place? The URL, as fewer than 50 words in length - and indeed fewer than 50 characters - is not prohibited by copyright law.

Without a crime there can be no conviction.

I am fed up with seeing professionals in the IT industry taken to court not over something they have done but over something which happened afterwards, normally through the deliberate action of an uncharged third party.

If it is an offence to request the stream without having visited the website (which I doubt) then the person charged should be the person who clicked the link not the webmaster who provided it. Do you see gun retailers charged with murders by their customers?

This judgement is absolute nonsense. A link is a link. It is not infringement of copyright in any way, shape or form.

The only thing that was copied was the URL. Yes, the Uniform Resource Locator. Note the word 'Locator' - because that's all it is - something to help locate something.

There are many technical ways to stop anyone linking directly to the URL. Single-session URLs, HTTP_REFERER checks, cookie checks and password protection all spring to mind. Nobody with the technical expertise to set up live streaming at such a scale would need more than minutes to set up any of those checks.

I don't think it's that this judgement needs to be thrown out of court - I think it's more the judge.

If I found the phone number of a local store from the Yellow Pages and published it on my webpage about that store, it would be crazy for the Yellow Pages to sue me for allowing people to find the phone number for that store without seeing all their adverts around it.