Only News That's Fit to Link Free Speech8/23/2000; 9:04:30 AM 'Kaplan's ruling, legal experts say, appears to be an unprecedented expansion of traditional copyright law. No longer is it merely illegal to distribute a potentially infringing computer program -- but now even linking to someone else's copy could be verboten.'This article provides a good overview and connects this with the past year or two of history.'For its part, 2600 simply removed the links to copies of DeCSS. But they left the non-HTML versions of the addresses intact, so visitors can simply copy and paste them into a browser window.'Good; this will help highlight the absurdity.Court: "Stop linking to DeCSS."2600: "OK... here's non-linked URL's."Court: "Stop providing non-linked URL's."2600: "OK, here's obfuscated URLs: aicth tee tee pee colon slash slash..."Court: "Stop that!"2600: "OK, if you search google for "DeCSS", you can find 20 sites providing the code...What do you do after that? Order 2600 to pretend there's no such thing as DeCSS? "Never mention" it? ("Click here to download a program to deactivate encryption on DVDs.") This just can't fly, it's a restraint on First Amendment rights, and there's no line in this case to draw that can make this somehow make sense without destroying too much other stuff too.