Q: What is a hyperlink?

Q: If a hyperlink is just a location pointer, how can it be illegal?

Q: What is an "inline" image?

Q: What is the Robots Exclusion standard?

Question: What is a hyperlink?

Answer: Unless you typed the URL directly into your web browser, you probably followed a hyperlink to get to this page. A hyperlink is a location reference that the web browser interprets, often by underlining the text in blue, to "link" to another information resource when clicked. In HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the code used to write web pages), a hyperlink looks like this: <a href="http://chillingeffects.org/linking/">link</a>

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Question: If a hyperlink is just a location pointer, how can it be illegal?

Answer: A few courts have now held that a hyperlink violates the law if it points to illegal material with the purpose of disseminating that illegal material:

• In the DeCSS case, Universal v. Reimerdes, the court barred 2600 Magazine from posting hyperlinks to DeCSS code because it found the magazine had linked for the purpose of disseminating a circumvention device. (See Anticircumvention (DMCA).) The court ruled that it could regulate the link because of its "function," even if the link was also speech.
• In another case, Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry, a Utah court found that linking to unauthorized copies of a text might be a contributory infringement of the work's copyright. (The defendant in that case had previously posted unauthorized copies on its own site, then replaced the copies with hyperlinks to other sites.)

Like anything else on a website, a hyperlink could also be problematic if it misrepresents something about the website. For example, if the link and surrounding text falsely stated that a website is affiliated with another site or sponsored by the linked company, it might be false advertising or defamation.

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Question: What is an "inline" image?

Answer: An "inline" image refers to a graphic displayed in the context of a page, such as the picture here: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) permits web authors to "inline" both images from their own websites and images hosted on other servers. When people complain about inline images, they are most often complaining about web pages that include graphics from external sources.

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Question: What is the Robots Exclusion standard?

Answer: Robots (or 'bots or webcrawlers) are automated web browsers that "crawl" the web to retrieve web pages, for example on behalf of search engines or price comparison sites. The Robots Exclusion standard is an informal convention many of these robots obey, by which webmasters can place a "robots.txt" file on the webserver to tell web robots to avoid some pages or entire sites.

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