Friday madness from BoingBoing, which passes on a tale of ludicrous Japanese copyright enforcement. The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper has been awarded compensation became people hyperlink to stories using headlines for text - and it seems it doesn't even matter if they're linking to the newspaper's own stories.
Under this rule, you'd need permission to linking to say our story on Nigeria's plan to jail spammers with the link "Nigeria set to criminalise spamming". Ludicrous.
From AFP:
The Intellectual Property High Court, a special branch court of the Tokyo High Court, ordered Digital Alliance Corp. to pay about 237,700 yen (2,000 dollars) to the Yomiuri.
The court said the use of news headlines by Digital Alliance was illegal. It is the first ruling in Japan giving protection to news headlines.
But presiding Judge Tomokatsu Tsukahara said that headlines were still in a legal gray area as they are not mentioned under Japan's Copyright Law. He did not order Digital Alliance to pull the Yomiuri headlines off its website.
Digital Alliance runs a small information website called Line Topics which collects news articles and headlines. On clicking a headline, a web user is forwarded to the Japanese site of search giant Yahoo!, which provides the article.
The madness never ends.
So, apparently, if I link to Yomiuri's story that stars are supporting Japan's Rugby World Cup bid by using the text Stars support Japan's Rugby W...
[snip]
Lawyer gives cold, steely glare and promptly disconnects computer.
