It seems so ridiculous that we still need to say things like "analogous to a footnote or a card index". A link is a link and its a common and standard enough part of our world to be considered as its own thing.
How long do we have to play this stupid game? A link is like a reference to a site that's like a book that's hosted on something like a library which makes this behavior kind of like stealing my left shoe. It's like trying to regulate highways based on laws about herding pigs in a national forest.
The existing law deals with X set of events. In order to adjudicate on this event a, different in form but one could argue not function from X, one must first relate it to similar elements in X. X is the corpus of existing law, a is the case at hand. This is, in a nutshell, part what the courts are for - refining and logically extending the law.
Sure, if we had laws about books and we needed to to make a judgement about pamphlets, that works. But we can't just pretend that we are extending some sort of logical rules from first principals. A link or an embedded video is not like a footnote in any way that matters.
> A link or an embedded video is not like a footnote in any way that matters.
I would argue that for the purpose of copyright infringement, a link is exactly like a footnote - it's a reference to an external document. It just happens that hypertext makes it much easier for the reader to look up the reference.
How long do we have to play this stupid game? A link is like a reference to a site that's like a book that's hosted on something like a library which makes this behavior kind of like stealing my left shoe. It's like trying to regulate highways based on laws about herding pigs in a national forest.