While trying to catch up NBC's “Days of our Lives” today
since I was gone, I went to “soaps.com” and was surprised to see a statement
after today’s plot summary, “Please be aware we have a link-only policy”. I wasn’t even sure what that means. Presumably that means you can’t copy their
summaries, you can only link to them – and that would be reasonable as the site
(“Dustin’s” former site) uses the detailed daily summaries to attract
advertising income.
However, the site would not be able to tell someone
they can’t claim “fair use” – if it really was “fair”. Possibly it could be fought in court –
expensive. For example, other’s (myself
included) will sometimes discuss individual characters in this or other soaps
as they would in discussing any TV series or movie. For example, a reviewer might write is own
discussion of Will and Sonny in light of the gay marriage issue, or might
discuss the interesting legal and ethical problems subsumed by the plot thread
where Will writes about his own family and gets paid for it, or why EJ didn’t
want a funeral when he was gone – because that really brings up some
interesting issues that can apply to a lot of people. But the words and analysis have to be “yours”
(or “mine”). (The “soaps” site is in a
sense a “derivative work”, but that’s another matter.)
I checked around, and found some commercial sites do
have “linking policies”. Jack Daniels,
for example. But no company, in today’s
legal environment, can stop some other party from linking to them. (It can stop reproduction of its trademark
dress designs, for instance.) Back about a dozen or more years ago, there were
some battles over “deep links” which are legally the same thing as
bibliographic footnotes in a term paper.
Some companies in the past worried they would lose advertising revenue
to deep links, but in practice that is very much a red herring.
A site called “Seq legal” has a presentation on the
issue, here. It offers a good explanation as to why
links matter.
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