Bloggers Beware- Your Linking Rights Are Under Threat

Soon, blogs of the kind we read and write could change...

Slate reports a case:

Jones Day is a law firm with 2,300 lawyers.

BlockShopper, the real estate news site, is a start-up with 15 employees.

The news site ran a headline reporting the purchase of a home by a Jones Day lawyer. Three months later it reported another such purchase. In both the cases, it gave links to the bio available in the website of Jones Day.

For some reason, Jones Day hated that.

They demanded that the news items should be removed.

BlockShopper refused.

Jones Day retaliated by suing BlockShopper for trademark infringement.

The judge was not sympathetic to BlockShopper. Unable to meet the six-digit expenses of arguing the lawsuit, BlockShopper came to a settlement.

As demanded by Jones Day, BlockShopper would link, but its anchor would be the full URL of the Jones Day website, instead of whatever BlockShopper could choose.

Jones Day has had its way, though in what way its trademark was threatened, and has now been safeguarded is not clear.

Wendy Davis, who wrote the article, points out 

• this threatens the right of Web sites to link freely.
  
• this signals to companies that they can force sites to revise their linking styles by alleging trademark infringement- Web publishers may have to spend significant sums to deal with this kind of litigation.
  
• Web sites could  be forced to use different linking protocols for every company they write about. Not only would they lose control over stylistic decisions, but accommodating a variety of individual requests could be unwieldy and labor intensive, which also means expensive.
• If sites really needed permission to link to others, the Web would be a very different place.  It's hard to imagine there would be a Gawker, or for that matter a TMZ, a Wikipedia, or anywhere else that embarrasses the subjects of posts.

This case is pending- a government lawyer in Sheboygan, Wis., has demanded that blogger (and political critic) Jennifer Reisinger remove from her site a link to the police department- JSOnline

This could get worse, we might not be able to link anything at all. Wikileaks.org has received notices from Scientologists, Mormons for publishing copyright material; the Mormons issued legal warnings to Wikimedia Foundation for linking  to the material in a WikiNews article. Wikimedia obliged. You can read this at FOXNews.com. 

How would such activities help democracy or free speech?

May be, NDTV should take note of this.