IT WAS going, some said, to destroy the World-Wide Web. In October last year [24/10/96] Lord Hamilton gave the Shetland Times newspaper an interim interdict (an injunction, in English) forbidding its Web-only rival the Shetland News from linking to stories on its Web site. Yesterday [11/11/97] the Times's people were struggling and failing in Edinburgh's Court of Session to set up the UK's first presentation of the Web as live evidence. Then they settled. It was set to be theatrical, with the National Union of Journalists funding the defence of the new medium against a newspaper's action, and its Scottish Organiser summoned to give evidence against it.

Professor Charles Oppenheim of De Montfort University "would have liked to have seen the case tried, producing a clear statement of what is and is not permitted." If the Shetland Times had won, it could have made the Post Office rich delivering signed contracts authorising all the links into Scottish web-sites.

The settlement allows the News to link to individual news stories on the Times site, and to quote their headlines. The conditions are that the News must show the phrase "A Shetland Times Story" underneath each headline, must include a legible image of the Times masthead, and must arrange that each of these is a link to the Times headlines page. It sets no precedent and neither, contrary to some reports, did last year's interdict. Copyright continues to exist on the internet.

Jonathan Wills, who produces the News, said "We're very happy that the thing has been settled." Robert Wishart, publisher of the Shetland Times, told the Telegraph he has "no comment to make whatsoever." (There has been an affection deficit between the two since Wishart fired Wills as editor of the Times, and the latter won a substantial industrial tribunal award.) General Secretary John Foster said: "this was a case which the NUJ had to fight."

Solicitor Adam Taylor, a partner in City law firm Withers, would also have liked to see the case pursued. He notes that the settlement reflects good Web practice. If only for politeness, when you build a page it should, for example, direct your readers to this story on the Electronic Telegraph site. When they click their mouse on "this story" they will see this, and when they click on "Electronic Telegraph" go to our home page. Taylor notes that "There were doubts about the interim interdict, in which the pursuers asserted both that headlines are copyrightable and that the Web is equivalent to cable television."

"There will," Taylor believes, "be many more cases in which people will link straight to a page within someone else's site, by-passing the home page or blocking out the adverts." Edinburgh Web publisher and cybercafe manager Gavin Nicholson points out that "many of the sites commenting on this case include the text of the interim interdict. Is that Crown Copyright?" (If it is, Fair Use certainly applies.)

The Web is bound to get its day in court in the end.

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Written
12 Nov 1997

A much shorter version of this article appeared as "Shetland case settled"in the Telegraph Connected section (p2) on 18 Nov 1997.

This version is © copyright 1997 Mike Holderness; moral rights are asserted.