Re: "Publishing and Linking": roles of intermediaries

On 2012/06/30 11:52, Noah Mendelsohn wrote:
> On 6/29/2012 9:06 PM, ashok malhotra wrote:
>> If chillingeffects.com can say it, why can't we?
>
> Chilling effects is an organization and Web site that has as its motto
> "Monitoring the legal climate for Internet activity". The TAG is the
> technical architecture steering committee for the World Wide Web
> consortium.
>
> The TAG's charter says [1]: "The TAG's scope is limited to technical
> issues about Web architecture."

> Let's take one of your proposed quotes from Chilling Effects:
>
> "Question: Do I need permission to link to someone else's site?
>
> Answer: In general, if someone is making a website publicly available,
> others may freely link to it. That open linking is what makes the web a
> "web." "
>
> Personally, I would like things to be that way, but this is couched as a
> statement of legal fact. Whether it's accurate as a statement of the law
> in any particular jurisdiction, much less worldwide, is something about
> which I don't think the TAG has any business drawing conclusions.

I agree that the exact wording at chillingeffects.org is not suited for 
the TAG.

But if the TAG (together with the people here on the mailing list,...) 
can't come up with some very good (technical!) arguments for why linking 
to publicly available websites should be allowed in general, and can't 
show why, technically, open linking is what makes the web a "web", then 
I would be extremely disappointed.

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Monday, 2 July 2012 08:23:01 UTC