Is it possible to legally prohibit someone from linking to specific pages on your website? By linking I meant to give exact instructions about how to find a specific page on the site, for a user with enough privilege. It can be a URL, or a demonstration of where you should click, etc. The site don't have to be open to everyone. But they had no informations about their user's real identity. Everything they could get is at most an "I agree" checkbox during registration. I'm not asking about whether they can remove the user posting or using the link, but is it possible to legally request removing the link itself (in other sites)? My first guess is no. I think it is not directly related to copyright as the user didn't post the content, and your terms of service cannot affect other sites. But then I feel there are some quite similar things seemed possible, and someone must be already trying to do this. So is it? If yes, what are those terms called (a part of the copyright license or terms of service, or something else)? @apsillers pointed out this may have something to do with the contract law. I think indeed this can be done between companies, or companies and employees. But (1) is it still effective if the site just let users to agree to the terms online? (2) If a user did it anyway, I think you can only remove the user in your site, or in theory you can let the user pay. But you still cannot remove things in other sites, because those sites didn't agree to the contract. Is that right? I'm thinking about a license like this: You can use the ideas in whatever way you want (they are not patented; or maybe they are, but the fact your site is describing them cannot be patented). You cannot copy the articles directly (there is copyright). You cannot refer to the explanations in this site in formal documents of a company, or prove this site has promoted this idea. Or a weaker term: you have to pay to do that. You can rewrite the whole things, or don't leave explanations, or whatever. This is indeed a bad idea which I thought it must be disallowed at first. But it seemed to be weaker than what a company can have with their employees.
No. You are correct in that this is not related to Copyright. Copyright is meant to protect expressions of an idea. An URL is simply an address, like a street address. Can you legally stop people referring to your home address? No. Can you legally stop people from passing by and looking at your house on the street? Also no. A famous case related to hyperlink is Ticketmaster v Tickets.com (2000). Tickets.com used information Ticketmaster's website and deep-linked to there. The ruling established that: use of information is not infringing hyperlinking cannot be copyright infringement because no copying is involved. deep linking is not unfair competition If you feel that it is necessary to avoid people linking to specific pages of your site, you may consider accomplishing this technically. UPDATE It does not matter whether your site is meant to be public or not. For example, an knowledge base meant to be shared internally in an organization, but accessible on the internet since staff are geographically distributed. Again, you may think of it like a street address. A private corporate building meant for employees only. An address, like Room C, 16/F, Example Corporate Complex, 4321 Lucky Avenue can be shared like any other address. You cannot demand people to never refer to your office address. You can, however, setup a security post at the entrance and only allow certain guests to visit you. In the case of a website, you may state in your terms that one cannot share access information to any external parties. This will include the sharing of any authentication data (e.g. password) which can be used to access content.
Online file converters are legal: there is no law that prohibits a person from making a program available and executing online, including creating output in the form of a file. It is possible that some person may illegally copy copyright-protected material then use a website to modify that material, in which case the question of vicarious liability for copyright infringement could arise, so we appeal to the DMCA safe harbor provisions to see what the website must do. First, the owner of copyright must submit a properly constructed takedown notice to the website. Crucially, the notice must contain sufficient information that the website operator can find and take down the item(s) in question. Assuming that the complainant can supply the &quot;where is it&quot; information, then there is a notice and counter-notice routine where the uploader is informed and can deny the accusation – the website operator doesn't evaluate the merits of the claim, he only sees that the formalities were observed. If the operator follows the rules, he cannot be held vicariously liable. If the link does not expire and if it is somehow promulgated, the technical potential for being a contributor to copyright infringement becomes very real, but it puts the operator in no worse a legal position than Youtube. So the question is not just related to OCILLA, it is entirely covered by that law. Questions of how users or website owners are &quot;supposed to&quot; act don't figure into this. If the website owner does not comply with those provisions, they have no access to the safe harbor provisions, and they can be sued. However, the website itself remains legally &quot;permitted&quot; (there never was a prohibition of such a website).
1) I saw that no where during registration you actually tell what your work does, you only fill up details, how exactly is it protecting you if you don't specify? For example I have a computer program/website that do something, how exactly the copyright protects you if you did not specify about it? A copyright protects a particular single expression of an idea and versions that are derived from that particular expression. When you copyright software you have to provide approximately 50 pages of printed code so as to make it possible to distinguish your code from someone else's and you generally deposit a full copy with the Library of Congress. The ideas in the computer program are not protected. You only protect the exact language of the code in the computer program and other programs that use that exact language as a starting point. If someone reverse engineers a way to achieve the same process or outcome with different code language (or even comes up with exactly the same code language without ever looking at the language used in your code) then their software does not infringe on your copyright. To protect the ideas in a computer program you need a patent. 2) If I am a non-us citizen, do I need to select in State "Non-US", or leave it blank on "Select"? Because it allows me to complete registration with either. State "Non-US" refers to where you are located, not to your citizenship. If you are located outside the U.S., then you select "Non-US" and if you are located in a U.S. state, but are a non-citizen, you select the state where you are located. The answer does not affect the validity of your copyright. It is used for economic statistics and to determine where the copyright office should locate its own offices to be maximally useful to the public.
What would be the legal validity of this behaviour? Your changes to the browser source of the website contract or license of Terms of Service (TOS) - essentially a "click-wrap" license - before agreeing to it means nothing in a legal sense, other than to void the contract. The other party (the website) can't possibly agree to those contract changes without them being submitted as contractual changes and agreeing to them, if they did agree to them. That's basic contract law. That website TOS probably has a clause that says that if you don't agree to the TOS in full, as written, without modifications, you can't use the website. And the TOS may also say that they reserve the right to prevent you from using the site by closing your account or even blocking your access. Your "witness" to the contract changes is meaningless, as your witness is not a party to the contract. And any witness to the fact that you have changed the terms of the TOS before agreeing to it would work against you in a civil proceeding as proof of your attempt at modifying the contract.
Those posts are talking about making a modified copy of a copyrighted work. The key word is copy. You are not making a copy. Copyright is not about how a physical embodiment of a copyrighted work is treated. You can burn a book and shred a newspaper. Neither of those actions is making a copy. Also, cutting up a newspaper and pasting a picture on your wall has nothing to do with any “derivative works” issue.
You have the right to request anything you want, but there is a very limited set of things that you can have a legal expectation of them doing. The service provider has no obligation to block a user. You can likewise request a report, and from a pirate site I would expect no response. There is no legal requirement that a pirate site block an offending user after a certain number of offenses. There is no direct way to compel a pirate site to ban a user. Indirectly you might accomplish that end if you take legal action against the site, which causes them to ban a user in order to protect themselves If a DMCA request was not "proper" (the correct legal form) they will not perform a takedown, and may not inform you that they won't. Make sure your takedown request is legally correct and actually delivered to the correct person. If they still ignore your request, they will have lost the "safe harbor" provisions, and you can theoretically sue them. Since the pirate site presumably only hosts a link to elsewhere, their making public such a link is not itself copyright infringement, so you need to be going after the ISPs who manage the actual host sites. The pirate site might still be a contributor to infringement, along MGM v. Grokster lines. A standard defense against infringement would be "We had no idea", and ignoring DMCA takedown notices is clear proof that they did have an idea. That's basically what DMCA takedown is about: saying what it takes to use the "We had no idea" defense.
It's not illegal to say things in your profile. SE requires you to license your content to them on a non-exclusive basis pursuant to CC BY-SA 4.0. &quot;Non-exclusive&quot; means that you can also license the material to others on some other basis, e.g. CC0. In that case, a person who uses your material can rely on the other license that you granted. If SE wanted to, it could prohibit putting licenses in a user profile, in which case you would have to promulgate your more generous license elsewhere.
To answer part of your question, the takedown and restoration process of the DMCA is not required. It is a legal way a hosting site can stay in the clear for copyright infringement. Therefore, if the site didn't take down what you complained about, they're participating in copyright infringement (if that's what's happening). Since they did not take down the material (assuming your DMCA was in the right legal form), if you do sue over copyright infringement you can sue the site as well as whoever uploaded your stuff to the site. I don't think that linking to your stuff would itself be copyright infringement, so I'd suggest consulting a lawyer specializing in IP.