I don't know enough about the fundamentals of the law to say whether or not causing you to incorporate material from Party A in a presentation purporting to originate from Party B amounts to Party B copying from Party A and falls within the limits of Fair Use. One of Litman's central points is that Fair Use is an extremely narrow public-good right, defined in the face of active legal representation of people with an interest in claiming the broadest possible ownership rights.

Figuring out how framing fits into the body of law is going to be tricky, because the nearest physical publishing equivalent would be if somebody gave you a kit to paste a different publisher's cover onto a book you got for free. Kind of like Taral's project with Harlequin Romance covers and SEEDS OF CHANGE. (Though the cover of a book might have too much special juju in commercial publishing law for this to be a balanced analogy.) It does seem pretty clear to me that framing is different enough from providing a normal link in HTML in the dimension of property rights and reputation considered as property that these two acts can be guaranteed to be treated in the same way by IP law.

Trademarks are a different department than copyrights, with their raison d'etre solely being solely that of giving the trademark owner control over the use of its mark. Using an IMG link to somebody's registered trademark, such that it displays on an unrelated web page whenever the page loads might well turn out to be prohibited by law. Attacking a company's reputation by using an IMG link to their trademark in a way that is seen to lead inevitably to their defamation is probably illegal already, and establishing its illegality through legislation is something a lot of people would pay good money for, if they haven't already.

That was "...an <A HREF="..."> tag..."

That is, a standard HTML tag that indicates a hyperlink to some other document, but doesn't actually retrieve anything until you click on the web page.

Presumably, their interest is in controlling the way that they are represented on the web, but still, this seems like it would do them more harm than good if people took it seriously.

The only people who are going to be deterred from linking to your site are people (like me) who would make links to your site to help spread the word about NPR's good content but who don't want to fill out a 17-point form and wait an unknown amount of time before posting the link.

Again: Nothing good comes to NPR from this linking policy. All that comes from this linking policy is bad will. NPR survives on good will. Think about that.

Their response should be interesting.

It's possible that NPR has made the all-too-common mistake of taking advice from an attorney when there was no action pending or threatened. It seems to me that darned little good comes of this, and a great deal of harm (e.g. the collapse of general aviation manufacturing in the United States). They might have been convinced that legal cover w.r.t. linking and framing is important.

Cui bono? Lawyers. But that would be barratry.

The thing is: everything that Teresa says is correct (and brilliantly put, btw), but a lot of people are disconcerted by the fact that internal links and external links look pretty much the same (unless you know what you're looking for, which most experienced web users do). Perhaps NPR is afraid that links will make it look as if their material belongs to the person who linked to it. That's almost certainly part of what bothers people who oppose deep linking.

I'm not saying these arguments hold up, or that their solution is of any use whatsoever. But when someone does a dumb thing, it's helpful to try to figure out what they thought they were doing.

I don't much care for frames; the ones that display the whole page are tolerable, I suppose. IMO, the nearest publishing equivalent to frames is "whatever imaging and printing method you used to produce the final pages". That is to say, it doesn't matter how the image was produced; it matters what the reader sees.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to stretch a bit for a hardcopy analogy.

Say you produced an edition of =Making Light= which printed my essays in black but had my name, intros, copyright notice, and previous publication info printed white-on-white, and you put a colored border which prominently features your own name around the edge of each page. You follow me so far? If that happened, it wouldn't matter that my name, intros, and indicia were there in theory, or were visible on the mechanicals and seps and plates, or were visible if you ironed the printed pages until they turned brown; nor would it matter that =Books in Print= listed me as the author. What matters is that the readers would see your name on my content.

Re your later remark: Lawyers don't justify their existence by saying "Sure, go ahead; it'll probably be all right."

Janet, I've known more than one person who's believed that having outside links on their sites automatically meant they were endorsing whatever was on those sites. Some even believed they could be held responsible for the content of any sites they linked to. This is dim, but it happens. NPR has taken it one step further, and decided they might be held accountable for sites that link to them. The phrase "thick as two short planks" comes to mind. For the rest of the "how", see Simon's remarks, which nail it down nicely.

When I saw the line about left-handed diabetic socialists, my immediate thought was that I had to know at least one of them. Thanks for confirming it so promptly.

Keith, you have to let us know what they say. It'll be interesting to see how long they take to reply.

Kevin, I can't say much to that, but I can't improve on it, either.

But I guess I haven't managed to convey the essential difference of trademarks. Putting transparent stickers over trademarks on products in stores or in advertisements might well be actionable, again with no reproduction of the original.

I don't believe that there is any "Fair Use" of trademarks, as the legal rationale for existence does not include furthering the public good. They're like hallmarks, I guess, and as defensible and proprietary as one's own good name.

The Yahoo TV listings cited (as well as nearly all other TV conglomerated US TV listings, aside from TV-Guide/Gemstar-branded ones) are supplied by Tribune Media Services, and are generated not only with the approval but the active support of the TV stations.

For whatever reason, the Blockbuster/DirecTV Pay-Per-View channels choose not to cooperate, and thus are not listed; that's the only major holdout I'm aware of.

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/02/06/22/151257.shtml?tid=95
http://www.users.cts.com/king/k/kst/not-npr.html

(BTW, is it possible to put real links in these comments? It seems like it just kills angle brackets and everything between them.)

<Like this.>

Todd, that may not make any difference to my point, but it's interesting.

Keith, I've been trying to figure that out myself. In the meantime, I have the power to delete or amend posted comments, so if one of your comments gets scrootched and I'm not too busy to fix it, drop me a note.

Matt, I can't think it's at all likely that URLs would ever be copyrighted. That would be like trying to copyright the volume, issue, and page numbers of a magazine.

Deliberate trademark dilution is a tort, and copyright infringement is a crime. NPR's linking policy doesn't give them any greater ability to enforce their rights than current US federal law does, and it annoys people who *aren't* trying to violate NPR's rights.

There was (or is?) a long-running court battle between WestLaw and Lexis over WestLaw's copyright claims on page numbers. See http://lists.essential.org/1995/info-policy-notes/msg00019.html for an overview of the issues as of 1993 -- the 8th circuit court of appeals upheld the claim in 1986.

http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb0621-4.htm appears to have final status -- eventually a court of appeals decided the page numbers weren't copyrightable, and in 1999 the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

So, if the issues are the same, URLs probably aren't copyrightable -- but it might take 14 years of court time to decide that for sure.

I'm glad they finally decided page numbers aren't copyrightable. Upholding the original decision would have been, in my considered and highly technical opinion, Way Dumb.

I hope that if the question ever comes up with URLs, they'll take the appellate court's decision as a precedent and spare us the fourteen years of litigation.

On the "cui bono" face of it, the decision by the Court of Appeals allowing copying of WestLaw's page numbers by CD-ROM publishers and other vendors was probably driven by a combination of the Clinton Department of Justice getting out of the way and an acknowledgement that "Vendor Neutral Citation Systems" would displace WestLaw page numbers and make the noncompetitive support of WestLaw by the Federal government too obvious to maintain.

See, the key fact here is that Federal courts would only accept citations based on West Publishing/WestLaw page numbers and "star pagination" and the collection of parallel citations and legal history collected by West Publishing in their documents in legal briefs. As explained in John Larason's first citation, the DoJ had connived with West Publishing to keep an otherwise definitive legal reporter database compiled by the USAF and in the public domain from being kept current for ten years. LEXIS settled with WestLaw in a secret agreement that let them use WestLaw page numbers.

So what this amounted to was that the Federal court system had arranged that every attorney who wanted to argue a Federal case essentially had to pay West Publishing, because they had a copyright on their page numbers. The parallel with URLs as a method of specifying indexes and offsets into documents is fairly exact, and frightening.

The last line of Larrason's second citation is, "One thing is sure: It ain't over yet."

West Publishing is part of the Thomson publishing group, so its trail leads back to "Lord Thomson of Fleet," originally the publisher of a minor paper in North Bay, a man famous in Canada for some years for his remark that, "A television broadcasting license is like a license to print money." This is an enterprise with a history of knowing how to exploit government interference with a market.