The Denver Post has sued the Drudge Report—still one of the best link repositories—for copyright infringement. Normally, who cares, right? Well, Drudge might care, being that he’ll be stuck in the legal system one way or another for a little bit now, but us non-aligned folks? No matter. But that’s not quite the case now, given the lawsuit’s nature. Since when is linking to a photo copyright infringement?
The Post claims that by using a photo, which just so happens to link to the article where the photo appears, Drudge willfully violated their copyright. And if that’s the case, then Drudge owes quite a lot of people quite of lot of money, since that’s how he does things.
In fact, that’s pretty much how everyone does things. I dare you to find a big site out there that doesn’t regularly use other people’s photos with a link. Instead you’ll see something like “photo via this dude’s Flickr account,” etc.
Perhaps more prickly for Drudge is that the company handling the lawsuit, Righthaven, has tried to seize entire domain names in the past for similar offenses.
The funny thing is, I’d wager the Denver Post’s site saw more traffic as a result of the Drudge link that they’d had for quite some time.
And this is how they thank him!
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CORRECTION~! Apparently Mr. Drudge *didn’t* link to the Post article where the photo in question was published alongside, putting him squarely in the wrong here. You’d think that a site that’s been linking to and fro’ for many years now would have learned a thing or two about Net etiquette, to say nothing of copyright law.
