If the Web Had Come First: “[...] In my …
If the Web Had Come First: “[...] In my previous post, I provided my readers with the full text of two magazine articles and a Google Docs spreadsheet. Before doing so I obtained no permissions, made no effort to determine who held the copyright or deserved the credit for them, spent no time at all making sure I had the text right. None of that was necessary because, instead of quoting them, I linked to them.
Doing so also resolved any moral reservations I might have had about making use of the authors’ work. They put their work up on the web in order that other people could read it. My links funneled readers to them, hence helped them to achieve the very objective for which they had written and webbed the pieces.
If the web had come first, issues of copyright and credit would have applied only to the rare case where someone chose to copy instead to link. Indeed, the relevant laws and norms might never have developed, since the very fact that what you were reading was a quote rather than a link, written by the quoter rather than the quotee, would be sufficient reason not to trust it.
The only difficulty I can see with applying this approach online today, linking instead of quoting, in order to work around the inconveniences of laws and norms developed in the context of print publication, is that you may want to quote only a part of what someone else has webbed. I am not sufficiently expert in HTML to know whether there is any convenient way of linking to a page in a way that will highlight the passage starting at character 583 of the target document and ending at character 912, in order to signal to the reader that that is the part you are quoting.
If there isn’t, there should be.”
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2010/11/if-web-had-come-first.html
