Jonathan W. G. Wills

Last updated

Jonathan Witney Garriock Wills (born 17 June 1947, in Oxford), is a Scottish journalist, author and former editor of The Shetland Times newspaper. In 1996, Wills's company was sued by the newspaper for deep linking.

Contents

Career

Wills is chiefly famous for his involvement in a notable lawsuit in 1996 [1] brought against him as publisher of The Shetland News website. [2] The plaintiff in the case, The Shetland Times , accused Wills' company, Zetnews Ltd., of infringing their copyright by using hyperlinks which bypassed their main webpage. [3] [4] Using so-called "deep linking", Wills bypassed the framework that the Times used to publish news articles on its website, specifically the main page and the interspersed advertisements. The case was settled out of court with The Shetland News agreeing to acknowledge any Shetland Times story which appeared on its website. [5]

Wills was also the first student Rector of the University of Edinburgh, a position he achieved in 1971.

Books by Jonathan Wills

Related Research Articles

Kazaa Media Desktop was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequently under license as a legal music subscription service by Atrinsic, Inc., which lasted until August 2012. According to one of its creators, Jaan Tallinn, Kazaa is pronounced "ka-ZAH".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientology and the Internet</span>

There are a number of disputes concerning the Church of Scientology's attempts to suppress material critical of Scientology and the organization on the Internet, utilizing various methods – primarily lawsuits and legal threats, as well as front organizations. In late 1994, the organization began using various legal tactics to stop distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The organization has often been accused of barratry through the filing of SLAPP suits. The organization's response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.

In the context of the World Wide Web, deep linking is the use of a hyperlink that links to a specific, generally searchable or indexed, piece of web content on a website, rather than the website's home page. The URL contains all the information needed to point to a particular item. Deep linking is different from mobile deep linking, which refers to directly linking to in-app content using a non-HTTP URI.

<i>The Times of India</i> Indian English-language daily newspaper

The Times of India, also known by its abbreviation TOI, is an Indian English-language daily newspaper and digital news media owned and managed by The Times Group. It is the third-largest newspaper in India by circulation and largest selling English-language daily in the world. It is the oldest English-language newspaper in India, and the second-oldest Indian newspaper still in circulation, with its first edition published in 1838. It is nicknamed as "The Old Lady of Bori Bunder", and is an Indian "newspaper of record".

In computer networks, download means to receive data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar system. This contrasts with uploading, where data is sent to a remote server. A download is a file offered for downloading or that has been downloaded, or the process of receiving such a file.

<i>Fortean Times</i> British monthly magazine devoted to anomalous phenomena

Fortean Times is a British monthly magazine devoted to the anomalous phenomena popularised by Charles Fort. Previously published by John Brown Publishing, I Feel Good Publishing, Dennis Publishing, and Exponent (2021), as of December 2021 it is published by Diamond Publishing, part of Metropolis International.

Kuensel is the national newspaper of the Kingdom of Bhutan. It was the only local newspaper available in Bhutan until 2006 when two more newspapers were launched. The government of Bhutan owns 51% of Kuensel while 49% is held by the public.

WebCite was an on-demand archive site, designed to digitally preserve scientific and educationally important material on the web by taking snapshots of Internet contents as they existed at the time when a blogger or a scholar cited or quoted from it. The preservation service enabled verifiability of claims supported by the cited sources even when the original web pages are being revised, removed, or disappear for other reasons, an effect known as link rot.

The 2007 dance-pop song "Do It" performed by Canadian singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado features elements plagiarized from "Acidjazzed Evening", a chiptune-style track composed by the Finnish demoscene artist Janne Suni. Timbaland, "Do It"'s producer, admitted to sampling Suni's work, but did not believe his usage constituted "stealing", calling the allegations "ridiculous". Although users had noted the similarities between the two tracks on Finnish demoscene forums in July 2006, the Timbaland plagiarism controversy attracted mainstream attention in January 2007, when Internet users posted videos to YouTube alleging Timbaland had plagiarized Suni's work. Soon afterwards, the controversy attracted the attention of the Finnish news portal eDome, and the MTV and Rolling Stone websites, who all published articles detailing the events of the controversy. "Do It" was released as the fifth North American single from Loose on July 24, 2007.

Zetnet was one of the UK's oldest ISPs and according to New Scientist is the brainchild of Ghufar Razaq and Graeme Storey. It was founded in Lerwick, in the Shetland Isles by Ghufar Razaq, Graeme Storey, Tim Cole and Paul Martin. According to the Shetland Fishing News, a journal of Shetland's fishing industry, the company began trading on 13 October 1994.

Internet censorship in Singapore is carried out by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). Internet services provided by the three major Internet service providers (ISPs) are subject to regulation by the MDA, which requires blocking of a symbolic number of websites containing "mass impact objectionable" material, including Playboy, YouPorn and Ashley Madison. The civil service, tertiary institutions and Institute of Technical Education has its own jurisdiction to block websites displaying pornography, information about drugs and online piracy.

The Shetland Times is a weekly newspaper in Shetland, published on Fridays and based in Lerwick, the main town in the Shetland Islands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyright infringement</span> Usage of a copyrighted work without the authors permission

Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works. The copyright holder is typically the work's creator, or a publisher or other business to whom copyright has been assigned. Copyright holders routinely invoke legal and technological measures to prevent and penalize copyright infringement.

In copyright law, the legal status of hyperlinking and that of framing concern how courts address two different but related Web technologies. In large part, the legal issues concern use of these technologies to create or facilitate public access to proprietary media content — such as portions of commercial websites. When hyperlinking and framing have the effect of distributing, and creating routes for the distribution of content (information) that does not come from the proprietors of the Web pages affected by these practices, the proprietors often seek the aid of courts to suppress the conduct, particularly when the effect of the conduct is to disrupt or circumvent the proprietors' mechanisms for receiving financial compensation.

<i>Sega v. Accolade</i> 1992 American court case

Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510, is a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit applied American intellectual property law to the reverse engineering of computer software. Stemming from the publishing of several Sega Genesis games by video game publisher Accolade, which had disassembled Genesis software in order to publish games without being licensed by Sega, the case involved several overlapping issues, including the scope of copyright, permissible uses for trademarks, and the scope of the fair use doctrine for computer code.

The Shetland News is a news website serving the islands of Shetland, Scotland.

Events from the year 1996 in Scotland.

Ticketmaster Corp., et al. v. Tickets.Com, Inc. was a 2000 case by the United States District Court for the Central District of California finding that deep linking did not violate the Copyright Act of 1976 because it did not involve direct copying. The decision permitted Tickets.com to place deep links to Ticketmaster.

<i>PJS v News Group Newspapers Ltd</i>

PJS v News Group Newspapers Ltd [2016] UKSC 26 is a UK constitutional law case in which an anonymised privacy injunction was obtained by a claimant, identified in court documents as "PJS", to prohibit publication of the details of a sexual encounter between him and two other people. Media outside England and Wales identified PJS as David Furnish.

References

  1. Shetland Times Ltd. v. ZetNews Ltd. 1997 F.S.R. (Ct. Sess. O.H.), 24 October 1996
  2. Athanasekou, P. E. (1998) "Internet and Copyright: An Introduction to Caching, Linking and Framing (Work in Progress)" The Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT) 1998(2): Archived 27 January 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  3. "Scottish link suit settled". CNET. Retrieved 30 December 2021.
  4. "Editors Feud Over Whether Linking Is Stealing". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 30 December 2021.
  5. "Shetland Internet squabble settled out of court". BBC News. Retrieved 20 July 2021.
Academic offices
Preceded by Rector of the University of Edinburgh
1972–1973
Succeeded by