The Legal Kerfuffle Over Website Linking

By Alex in Blogs & Internet, Crime & Law on Sep 16, 2008 at 5:56 pm

Can someone stop you from linking to their website? That’s what the Sheboygan city attorney did. The city ordered Jennifer Reisinger to remove a link to the city’s police department website – and now, she is suing:

Can a city stop people from posting a link to its Web site?

That’s the question at the center of a federal lawsuit brought by a Sheboygan woman against the mayor and other officials there, in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind case, according to an Internet law expert.

Jennifer Reisinger says the Sheboygan city attorney ordered her to remove from her Web site a link to the city’s police department, in what she believes was retaliation for her support of recalling Mayor Juan Perez, according to the suit filed last week.

The city went further, the lawsuit claims, launching a criminal investigation of Reisinger for linking to the department on one of her sites.

Link – via The Raw Feed


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  1. CheeseDuck
    Sep 16th, 2008 at 6:31 pm

    What? It’s a public website. It’s not like a personal page, like a MySpace or Facebook.

  2. Miss Cellania
    Sep 16th, 2008 at 6:36 pm

    On the one hand, why have a website if you don’t want anyone to know about it? And why should a government agency have a “secret” but accessible website?

    If it’s an internal site, it can be passsword-protected. Otherwise, its silly to hide it.

  3. Edward
    Sep 16th, 2008 at 7:20 pm

    I was an expert witness in a similar case, so it is not a first. We prevailed, BTW.

    In essence, I argued that posting a website is the equivalent of opening a shop on Main Street. If you do not want everybody to come in, you need to give keys to the ones that you do want. Unless you do, you cannot prevent someone from sending her friends to your place of business.

  4. Evil Pundit
    Sep 16th, 2008 at 7:33 pm

    Clearly this is a harrassment tactic, with no legal or ethical basis.

  5. Jill
    Sep 16th, 2008 at 8:00 pm

    Where’s the link to the police website? That’s what I want to see in every story about this.

  6. darelparker
    Sep 16th, 2008 at 8:44 pm

    The article says that after she hired an attorney, the city withdrew its demand.

    Nevertheless, the fact that anyone in any government agency, be it federal, state, or municipal, believes that they have the authority to issue such a demand speaks volumes about how little these people understand the Internet or for that matter, the Bill of Rights.

    The city attorney could have spent five minutes with Google and determined that there was absolutely nothing wrong or illegal about the link. Instead, the city wasted time and resources, ultimately launching a police investigation against this woman. Truly sad.

    Every city employee who took part in this act of shameless ignorance should issue a formal apology.

    And although many may consider it frivolous, I would really like to see her lawsuit move forward, and have the the city and the police department held publicly accountable for their actions.

    Whether people realize it or not, this sort of poor judgment has far reaching implications, not the least of which is our right to free speech. If the very people responsible for protecting us do not understand our rights, then how can they be trusted to defend them?

  8. Christophe
    Sep 16th, 2008 at 11:15 pm

    if Neatorama is hyperlinked on a nazi/porn website, does it make it nazi/porn?
    It’s a waste of taxpayers money.

  10. Neatoramawontsendmeapassword
    Sep 17th, 2008 at 11:47 am

    Don’t most websites want people to link to them so they get more traffic? I don’t get this.

  11. Video Game Dork
    Sep 17th, 2008 at 12:26 pm

    This should be titled “The Sheboygan Kerfuffle” ! lol

  12. amberae
    Sep 17th, 2008 at 12:47 pm

    utterly ridiculous. Man, if you don’t link to a page these days, that’s when you get in trouble.

  13. MadMolecule
    Sep 18th, 2008 at 6:51 pm

    I’m a lawyer, though I don’t practice in intellectual property, and in law school I took a course in Cyberlaw. Many, many Web sites say, in those legalese-filled “Terms & Conditions” pages that no one reads, that you’re only allowed to link to the site’s homepage and not to any other pages. Example from NFL.com:

    “You may link to the home page of the Service without obtaining our permission provided that you do so only through a plain-text link. For any other type of link to the Service, you must obtain our permission.”

    The (rather flimsy, IMO) legal argument they base this on is copyright: They say they own the copyright in each individual URL on the site, and that by putting one of those URLs in the link on your page and posting it, you’re copying their URL and thereby infringing their copyright.

    It’s a weak argument and I doubt they’d win in court, but who wants to go to court over something like this?


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