Re: US court-case resolved against "Right to link"

Thanks, Harry, for bringing this case to our attention.

The situation is complicated, however.
First, because of the other violations that Brown was indicted for
and second because lack of knowledge is not a good defense.

In http://www.w3.org/TR/publishing-linking/ we argued that intermediaries
should be protected from prosecution for passing unlawful material
through their pipes but it is not clear whether that should extend to humans
as well.

You say that the technical community should speak out for right to link
(with caveats, I assume) but where would we do this?
The W3C has no place to to record its position on technical policy issues
such as net neutrality and right to link.
I argued for such a bulletin board when I was on the TAG

All the best, Ashok

On 1/23/2015 5:51 AM, Harry Halpin wrote:
> 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 14:43:09 UTC