Linking and Liability for Creators [Part I]

Part 1: What is Linking?

As early as the 1940’s, computers were seen to be instruments to manage and distribute huge amounts of information. Douglas Engelbart, upon reading Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think,” noted that “If these machines [could] show you information on printouts, they could show you that information on screen.” An individual could steer through different information spaces, viewing data and graphics in different ways. The realization of these ideas, however, did not come to fruition for some 44 years.

In 1989, tired of the perpetual hunt and peck of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee of the CERN atomic research center in Switzerland proposed software and protocols that would enable computers to browse the information contained on the NSFnet. Berners-Lee’s Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) made hyperlinks possible. (Ethan Watrall, MX Design and Technique)

A link is simply a connection between the content of two different files (or between different parts of a single file). A link may lead either to another file in the same web site, or to a file on a different computer located elsewhere on the Internet. Internet browsers automatically decipher the instructions given by links and retrieve the specified file. (Brad Bolin, http://www.bitlaw.com)

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