Could a Tweeted Link Draw Legal Wrath?
A lawsuit that never saw the light of day has, nevertheless, raised a question: is a person legally responsible, not just for posting, but for even linking to illegal content? As The Huffington Post reports, Oregon CBS affiliate KOIN-TV recently threatened to take legal action over a single tweet from the Web site OregonMediaCentral (OMC). OMC apparently got word of an "embarrassing" video posted to YouTube by the user kointastic concerning a couple of anchors. Wondering whether there may be a story, OMC tried to find the footage on YouTube, but it had already been removed. So they did what anyone does when all else fails; they turned to their Twitter account and asked their followers if anyone had seen the video before it was removed. In the tweet, they linked to the YouTube search page which was, of course, useless, since all the videos had been disabled on kointastic's account (all results have since been taken down).
KOIN-TV, though, was none too pleased with OMC's tweet, sending the following e-mail, under the curt subject line "Remove video links from your Twitter account":
A lengthy e-mail exchange between the two groups ensued, though nothing became of it, since the link led to an empty list of search results, and KOIN decided to drop it. The story begs the question, though: If the link had actually worked, could OMC be sued? Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig told OMC that no one can ever be "at risk because of a link."The 'kointastic behind the scenes video' lifted by one of your followers from YouTube, was stolen.
That is the property of KOIN Local 6. Kindly remove that posting and link so that we don't have to pursue legal action. Thank you.
It makes obvious sense. OMC didn't own the video; they were just linking to it. If anything, they were probably helping KOIN-TV by at least pointing them in the direction of the supposed culprit. Their intentions weren't exactly based on any moral impetus to pursue vigilante justice. We understand why KOIN-TV's knee-jerk response would be to bully the largest, most recognizable entity that appeared to be propagating the footage. But it's almost never a good idea to shoot -- or even threaten to sue -- the messenger. [From: The Huffington Post]
