US court-case resolved against "Right to link"

In particular, with Barrett Brown was given 5 years for linking to a
dump of archive, where unbeknownst to Barrett, credit card information
was in the archive.

 Although one may or may not agree with Barrett's rather idiosyncratic
statements and motivations, nonetheless it seems important that the
right to link not be overturned by politically-motivated court-cases.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/22/barrett-brown-trial-warns-dangerous-precedent-hacking-sentencing

Worse, this does not bode well not only for the right to link, but for
anyone using big data (where the data may contain information that is
unknown to you, which is usually the case in big data!), and so may
have a chilling effect on releasing open data and linking data in
general.

While it's probably too late for the technical community to comment on
this case, we should comment on this in order to prevent future
prosecutions over linking.

   cheers,
              harry

Received on Friday, 23 January 2015 10:52:00 UTC