In the European Union, link at your own risk

The European Copyright Directive provides that “Member States shall provide authors with the exclusive right to authorize or prohibit any communication to the public of their works.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/vol ... d9863388e7


Hyperlink At Your Own Risk

http://www.internetlibrary.com/publicat ... or_art.cfm

I've been reading other articles on this and it isn't as clear cut as they make it sound because there are a lot of issues involved.

Should the rules be amended to protect ourselves against these risks?

For a time, the large UK telecoms provider BT was maintaining that it had some patent on linking.

The answer in these cases is not to panic. Do nothing different until the dust settles. Or, as we seem to say these days: Keep Calm and Carry On.

How ridiculous. My own hyperlinking is for:

• making sure I don't distort what someone said
• giving the author credit
• showing a product on a website so others can find exactly where to buy it

and it is assumed that people put up a page because they want others to see it, not because they don't. If they want only certain people to see it, then they require some kind of login, like a non-public forum you can't even read unless you're logged in. (Even most of those don't make sense, and it seems like you ought to be able to read them even if you can't post. How do you even know if you want to apply for membership, if you can't see it?) People frequently contact me asking me to add links to their site on my links page, and I reply to them that their page has absolutely nothing to do with the thrust of my site, so the answer is no.

On my own site, I do have an exception about pictures. The html validator always says I have to have the ALT part of a picture tag, for blind people, or for searching. I don't mind if blind people are on my site (although I don't think it's possible to be successful in this field unless you can see), but because of limited bandwidth, I don't want others bringing my pictures into their own websites via a <img src="http://wilsonminesco.com/...> tag; and they would find them in a web search using the "Images" option which uses the ALT part of my <img...> tag. Many times, just to make the html validator happy, I made the ALT portion just say ALT="picture".

The whole advertising thing is out of control though. I get people wanting to advertise on my site, and I tell them, "No, I don't like advertising when I go on other sites, so I'm not going to advertise on mine." I'm not in life for the money. Virtually nothing that I buy is because of advertising, but rather research and searches and links.

UK Court: ISPs have to block *trademark* infringements in addition to copyright infringements



https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/b ... ingements/

Hmm, I'd rather not even have this thread. Think about it - we're a small forum, focussed on CPU design and single board computers. We don't have many posts, or many threads. We don't have very many members, and we're having a little trouble raising subscriptions between us to keep the site running.

So, what we need is more good content: more projects, more posts about interesting things relevant to anycpu.

We don't really need off-topic debates about the larger world - these are interesting issues to many of us, but it may not serve us well, as forum members, for the forum to be diluted.

I'm sorry, Ed. I was just reacting to the news and trying to do what is best for users.

I think there are some cheaper website providers but I'm also sure there are issues and you get what you pay for. I looked up TwoCows but I think they only take registrations by phone.

Here is a list of cheap hosts:

http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net ... ing-guide/

Thanks for the link!

BTW, please would you edit the head post's subject to add "OT:" as a prefix?