SURVEY OF DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPEAN DATABASE PROTECTION

摘要

The inventor of the hyperlink, Tim Berners-Lee, has specifically declined to grant permission to link to his website. Permission is unnecessary, he says, in an expression of his firm belief in the free-linking ethos of the Internet. Indeed, the World Wide Web is premised on a basis of linking as a channel for free distribution of information. Our Internet culture was founded on this notion of free accessibility. Nevertheless, as Internet pioneers and netizens have been forced to accommodate the arrival of traditional business and corporate interests in the online environment, intellectual property notions of entitlements and exclusion have begun to threaten the practice of linking.