No Legal basis for hyperlink tax

Meltwater Group, a privately held Norwegian global company committed to disrupting the status quo through novel technologies and a powerful, global sales and distribution infrastructure, looking to the Copyright Tribunal to clarify the issues of hyperlinks being a public amenity.  This move makes it clear that what the newspapers are proposing is nothing less than a hyperlink tax!

 http://meltwater.com/en/meltwater-takes-nla-uk-copyright-tribunal-over-proposed-hyperlink-tax

Linking is NOT violation of copyright

David Drummond, Senior VP and Chief Legal Counsel of Google, denying that Google violates any rights by linking when it uses headlines and a summary to flag up news articles on publicly available sites:

"This is not a question of Google not respecting copyright. This is a fundamental disagreement when you're applying copyright rules on the web," he said, adding that the idea that indexing sites was a violation "flies in the face of how the web has been built and how it operates."


Full text of David Drummond speech

The digital bill is also perceived to hold hidden threats

The threat of badly thought through legislation surrounds many aspects of the digital economy, and will affect life as it is lived on the internet.

Protests grow over digital bill

The Register on Walled Garden Searches

The realistic prospect of "walled garden" searches gets given a beating by The Register in these two articles.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/03/ms_google_bribes_nixed/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/27/bing_google_murdoch/