Jeff Jarvis recently argued in The Guardian that “linking is a right.” (By linking, I assume he’s referring to hyperlinking). The articled fascinated me for several reasons, but it also excited me because I hope to consider issues just like those he raises as I begin my communications law seminar at the University of Missouri this week.
Below are some initial thoughts and questions about his piece, which I hope to revisit during the semester. In the meantime, I would appreciate any comments or suggestions for where I could research more on the topic.
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As commenters on his Guardian piece asked, from whence emanate thine right? Rights, at least in the sense most useful for this discussion, tend to come from an official body of some sort. Does the right come from Tim Berners-Lee? ICANN? Pixie dust?
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Jarvis writes, “The internet is not a medium … it is a place. Think of it as a public park.” Even were it a place and not a medium, there are many kinds of places, which have many kinds of ties to government or regulation.
Were government to rezone a public park into an industrial zone, the place would cease to be a public park. Similarly, government could allow a small business to sell its goods on the property (think, e.g., food stands at a festival. The business’s location in the public park doesn’t permit someone to swipe its goods.
The above examples are to show that even a “public” place is subject to the restrictions of official bodies, whether those restrictions are viselike or baggy. Shouldn’t linking, then, be subject to the same potential restrictions? If so, linking is not a right instantly bestowed upon anyone with a Web browser.
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As if to anticipate this, Jarvis writes that he is not
“arguing that being in public gives anyone the right to copy and steal content. We both agree that copyright and intellectual property must be respected.
But linking is not stealing. Indeed, in the link economy I’ve written about here, linking is distribution; it is a benefit.
“Linking is not stealing” is the point in question, so this seems to just restate his conclusion.
As for linking being a benefit: Suppose I own a bomb, but, thanks to poor upkeep on my part, it’s going to explode in my face in a few weeks. You had a hunch this might happen, so one night you sneak it out of my basement whilst I slumber.
Hey, you saved my life! Thanks! But didn’t you still steal my bomb?
I’m not sure I really buy Jarvis’s argument either. And in large part because I don’t see Jarvis advance any reasons why intellectual property rights or privacy rights are somehow superseded by this new “linking-as-a-right” idea.
If I publish a website with confidential information that only a select group of people should have access to, am I still obligated to allow others to link to my site? It would seem to me that content holders should be able to control who has access to their content. And although there is a distinction between the actual content of a page and it’s URL, I’m not sure the distinction is so great as to allow for “linking-as-a-right.”