Linking can constitute
copyright infringement, US court says
Plaintiff
Batesville Casket Company, Inc. sells caskets and other funeral products and
services. Defendant Funeral Depot operates a website called funeraldepot.com
through which it offers to sell caskets, including BatesvilleŽ caskets.
Funeral Depot is not an authorized dealer of BatesvilleŽ caskets. If a
customer orders a BatesvilleŽ casket from Funeral Depot, Funeral Depot
arranges to buy the desired casket from an authorized dealer and arranges
for shipment from that dealer to the local funeral home chosen by the
customer.
Displaying at
least some photographs of BatesvilleŽ caskets on its website, resulted in a
cease-and-desist letter sent to Funeral Depot. Defendant removed the
pictures and came up with a great idea: The website was modified so that
small, "thumbnail" images of BatesvilleŽ caskets were linked to the
appropriate casket pages on the Veterans Society website. Veterans Society
is an authorized dealer of BatesvilleŽ caskets, who had a website, but at
that time did not display images of caskets. Funeral Depot designed the
Veteran's Society webpages. It paid for those web pages. And it controled
those web pages and changes to them. The casket web pages displayed Funeral
Depot's phone number rather than Veterans Society's number. Funeral Depot's
control over the casket web pages was so complete that the owner of the
Veterans Society was not aware of any changes to the casket portion of the
website. Batesville Casket alleged copyright infringement and sued Funeral
Depot before the United States District Court, Southern District of Indiana.
The court held
that Veterans Society was authorized to use the photographs, but that the
facts presented were unusual enough to take this case out of the general
principle that linking does not amount to copying (see
Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com). The court held
that linking to another website could indeed constitute copyright
infringement where the defendant has "extensive involvement" in the content
of the linked-to site.