Why Google's Autolink could survive

One argument of content producers is that Google, by placing autolinks onto their website, via their toolbar, is modifying their content in unintended ways that may reflect poorly on them depending where Google redirects them.

So here's the scoop.

In 2004, District Court Judge Buchwald of the Southern District of NY ruled that the mere appearance on a website of links to another site "will not lead a web-user to conclude that the owner of the site he is visiting is associated with the owner of the linked site." See Knight-McConnell v.Cummins.

Thoughts?

update: Marty Schwimmer of Trademark Blog offers his:

I think that this case is the exact opposite of auto-link. This case says that the action of linking does not suggest that the linkee endorses the linker. Auto-link raises the question of whether the linker endorses the linkee, which I think in many cases is an obvious yes.

In Knight Mcconnell, the defendant, by linking to the plaintiff, was held that by so doing did not suggest that plaintiff somehow endorsed the defendant. This is usually the case. When the fan site links to the professional team's site for example, the team might have complained until it realized that no one thought that the fan was an authorized 'official fan site' just because he linked to the team (and by now teams have realized that the fan sites build traffic).

With an Auto-link-like function, we start with obvious cases where the linker does endorse the linkee. I say that this is a great restaurant that you should go to and I link to it. The problem is, what if I say that this is the worst restaurant in the world, and that it should be burnt down before another person is made ill, and then an auto-link-like function inserts a link to the restaurant (and provides a map).

Great point. Thanks for setting me straight Marty. Although the case I cited does not deal with identical circumstances, is it possible that other courts may come to the same opinion in the Google scenario

See also Denise Howell's IT Conversation with Schwimmer, Scoble and Doctorow for more Sound Policy on Google's AutoLink.

Prior Posts:
* Google's Autolink
* Google Autolink Opt Out Meta Tag
* Google's own medicine
* Hyperlink Confusion?

Update on Opt-Out: If Google doesn't offer an opt out, a possible solution for the content producer is to hyperlink any potential text that may be autolinked, since (at this point) links will not be overwritten.