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Comment by drtillberg | Hacker News Reader

I think the better point about hyperlinking is that you shouldn't have something so ambiguous at the center of the law concerning the use of the Internet.

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Indeed. Is it just the anchor tag or are other methods cool? If the site lets me embed their content in an iframe is that cool? What about bookmarks, all I am really doing is saving a link. What about link shorteners? Do they become illegal? What about instead of a link somebody programs an extension that intercepts links and manually types the link url into the address bar and programmatically presses return? If I drop the referer header are they even going to know it is a link? Is a bot that indexes their page into a search engine saving an illegal link? The answer to all of the above is probably whatever the IP holder deems the most profitable in each circumstance.

Technically-minded people are used to systems that are at some level logically consistent. A common misconception is that the same rules apply to politics and social or political power[1]. Laws and politics are not logical, internally consistent systems by design. Of course laws are written ambiguously; the uncertainty about the scope of a law is a feature.

Laws that might apply to a very broad set of behaviors and situations can be selectively enforced. If you are uncertain if you activities became illegal, you are incentivized to err on the safe side and self-censor.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Why do you think hyperlinks are illegal? What possible interpretation of the law are you using?

> What about bookmarks, all I am really doing is saving a link

Perfect example of the confusion caused by these fucking stupid articles.

i) The law doesn't apply in any way to your book marks.

ii) The only way the law could apply to your book marks is if you're a commercial organisation, and you publish them as part of a commercial venture, and if they are also more than hypertext links but include non-fair use portions of a copyright work.

The problem is, there is no "fair use" in europe. At least theoretically you can be sued for any use of copyrighted material.

It's called different things in different countries. In the UK it's called "Fair dealing". It is a lot more restricted than the US version of fair use. Isn't fair use, even in the US, a defence to a claim of copyright infringement, rather than a right?

I do wonder how the law works - does it work by the weight of the arguments in the text or by the simplest reading of it. So if the text literally says 'does not apply to hyperlinks' then any does infringement of other laws by hyperlinks win because it's there in black and white or does the weight of all the other arguments win?

IANAL, but usually if something is explicitly allowed by law you can rely on that even if other parts of the law forbid it.

The rule of lenity works that was for US criminal laws. For US civil law, it is not quite so.

This is a directive not a regulation - each EU member state gets to decide that.

Right? What is the maximum depth of links before it stops being illegal?

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