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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

What the US government and many other non computer-savvy people in power need to realize is that linking is speech!

One of my first employers was at a public television station. In his mind, he had to ask the other party permission to link to them. That is thinking of a link as a physical thing, as if it was a copper wire or a metal house key. It's not. It's just information. Needing permission to link to something is exactly like needing permission to talk about something. That shouldn't be. If we live in a society that believes in free speech, we should all be free to link to anything we want to!

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Free speech has many exceptions. So no, you shouldn't be able to link to anything you want to. Just like free speech, there are many exceptions about what you can link to which are already illegal.

That's like saying I can't walk out of a public art gallery and go tell a friend there's a cool landscape portrait by a famous artist hanging on the 3rd floor. That's linking.

By definition, if it's on the internet, it's public facing and therefore publicly available knowledge. Linking is simply telling others, hey, look over here for publicly available information.

Now, if you link to something illegal or perverse, depending on content, that could result in interest from the authorities but that's because you, the user, made a personal decision to directly affiliate yourself with that content via a link. The mere act of linking to publicly available information, should not in and of itself, be illegal or prohibited.

Really? That's the best analogy you could come up with? It's more like a newspaper printing advertisements that there will be stolen radios for sale or prostitutes behind the Walmart on Saturday.

Poor analogy. Unless there are other mechanisms in place, a link doesn't serve an advertising purpose any more or less than a purely informational one. I would like for a newspaper engage in activities like exposing fences or street prostitution. I believe that's called "reporting."

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