Fox issues threats to sites linking to YouTube videos

by Actual News Geezer | December 1, 2006 at 09:29 am

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Cory Doctorow has a very interesting column today about the lengths media corporations will go to enforce its control over the web. In this case, Fox is issuing legal threats to sites that link to material that Fox claims has been stolen from it.

An analogy would be if police arrested you for looking at a car that may be stolen.

Fox has invented a new copyright law: the right to control who links to clips of your work. They're sending takedown notices to websites that link to supposedly infringing clips on YouTube:

The below links are specific examples of quicksilverscreen.com web pages linking to video files that infringe upon Foxâs intellectual property rights. Fox hereby demands that quicksilverscreen.com promptly remove and disable the links to all unauthorized copies of Fox Properties on the quicksilverscreen.com website of which it is aware, including the infringing links identified below:

Copyright law doesn't allow you to control who links to things you don't like. Links don't infringe copyright. It's not a violation of copyright to link to material on the Internet.