Repent, all ye sinners. The end of the Web is nigh.

Well, okay, that may be a bit extreme. But when you consider that links are the Web’s foundation, a disturbing trend doesn’t bode well at all.

Consider these two news items:

• U.S. appeals court judge Richard Posner wrote last month that expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted material, or to bar linking to copyrighted materials, without the copyright holder’s consent, may be necessary to keep a viafble newspaper industry alive.
• The UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) is pursuing a plan that would require payments from anyone linking to their member newspapers’ online content. In fact, PR agencies would be charged for emailing a link to a client!

Both of these stories (which, by the way, Neville Hobson and I covered in today’s episode of today’s FIR) are worthy of commentary, but I’m more concerned about their collective impact. As more and more organizations seek ways to stop others from linking to their sites, or force payment in exchange, the value of the Web could decline precipitously.

This is serious. You can’t shrug it off by wondering how anybody could be so stupid as to want to reduce traffic to their own sites. Clearly, protection of copyright is a higher priority to some organizations than traffic.

I used to get this question from clients all the time, back in the early days of the Web. “Do I need to get permission to link to content?” I did my reseach, even asked lawyers, before I answered. Case law up to that point said that any content you put on the Web is subject to linking. From a linking standpoint, every page is equal; every page is the equivalent of a home page. If you don’t want someone to link to it, don’t put it on the Web or, at the very least, password-protect it.

As for the notion that copyright was violated by linking to copyrighted content, the courts—with a few narrow exceptions—found that links were not violations. After all, the content resides on the copyright holder’s server. All you’re doing is pointing people to that content.

What if all cases brought to court wound up like these two:

• A decade ago, U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell ordered Mormon church critics Jerald and Sandra Tanner to remove links from their site to copyrighted Mormon text.
• Three years ago, U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay granted a preliminary injuction against Robert Davis, who provided links to live audiocasts of motorcycle racing events copyrighted by SFX Motor Sports.

It would be devastating to the prospects of a useful World Wide Web. Google, which indexes all Web content through automated spiders, could be liable for search results that point to copyrighted content. The same would be true of Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.

But that’s not the scariest part. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) maintains its Hatewatch blog to keep “an eye on the radical right,” specifically neo-Nazi, racist, anti-Semitic and other hate groups. Imagine the courts telling these groups they could no longer link to such sites because they didn’t get permission from the copyright holder! (I can just hear someone from the SPLC calling the grand wizard of the KKK and saying, “Our blog keeps an eye on assholes like you. Can we have your permission to link to your website?”)

The case of Robert Davis isn’t nearly as momentous, but consider that a Firefox Greasemonkey script that automatically turns any link to an MP3 file into an embedded MP3 player. SFX Motor Sports sued Davis because people could listen to their audiocasts directly from Davis’ page, which means they never saw the ads or other associated content on their own site. What does that mean for anybody with the Greasemonkey script? Could they all be at risk for any MP3 file visitors could play directly from their sites?

The more you peel back the layers of the onion, the more questions arise. What about links people leave in comments to blog posts? What about shortened links to copyrighted content from Twitter and Facebook?

This is a no-brainer. Hyperlinks are to the web as cables are to a suspension bridge. No links, no Web. If copyright extends to links to content, then the value of the Web—not to mention searches of the Web—will diminish precipitously.

There needs to be more outrage over this trend, and a more coordinated effort to put a stop to it.