This all started way back in 2012, but the litigation's likely to continue for a while:
This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one- belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed.
Apart from its implications for bloggers, such a scheme - if successful - would destroy the World Wide Web itself, to say nothing of the implications regarding the American First Amendment; freedom of speech would effectively be curtailed. The web is constructed from links, which are in essence merely a form of shorthand; a means of effectively referring to or citing documents or other things. They in no way abridge copyright, nor do they, of themselves, incite others to do so, although this represents the fundamental argument set forth by the newspaper guild.
Moreover, in the context of "fair use" provisions of internationally accepted copyright law, citing a snippet from a document, with a link to the full text, does not constitute violation of copyright any more than do footnotes and other annotative formats commonly employed in scientific and academic publications; both approaches achieve identical ends, they hyperlink is simply a more efficient means of accomplishing the task through electronic media.
But with prices for so-called link "licensing" kicking off (in the publishers' dreams) at 300 euros a pop, they have visions of virtual gold mines dancing in their heads. Don't expect them to give up quickly.
