Hosting and Possession
Legislation that equated hosting illegal material with possessing illegal material would drastically curtail the ability of service providers to operate efficiently.
Licensing Transformation by Service Providers
Service providers should clearly indicate to controllers what transformations will be performed on their material.
Caching by Proxies
Legislation and licenses that restrict copying may consequently prevent caching by proxies which would make the Web slower.
Transformation by Proxies
Legislation and licenses that restrict the changing of data by proxies may also slow down the web, particularly in low-bandwidth situations.
Archiving by Archives
Legislation and licenses that restrict copying may consequently prevent archiving and therefore prevent archives from storing an accurate historical record of the web.
Transformation by Archives
Legislation and licenses that restrict the rewriting of links by archives make them harder, or even impossible, to use.
Copying by Search Engines
Legislation and licenses that restrict copying by search engines prevent information from being easily found by users.
Transformation by Search Engines
Legislation and licenses that restrict the transformation of material by search engines prevent them from using the information within the page to provide relevant information to people searching.
Redirecting to Illegal Material
Aliases mean that users could easily fall foul of legislation or licenses that banned access to particular information, because it is easy to put in place URIs that appear innocent but redirect to the banned information.
Permitting Linking
Legislation and licenses that forbid linking to particular pages on the web undermine the central mechanism for the way the web works.
Linking to Illegal Material
Website owners could easily fall foul of legislation or licenses that banned links to pages that contain illegal information, because they are not in control of the information on the linked pages.
As described above, in the context of the architecture of the World Wide Web, in linking from one page to another, a Web page author is referring to a part of the linked-to website or service. These links, as accessed through and processed by browsers are designed to be public identifiers. The existence of the link does not imply the right to access, and websites are free to use any one of many access control techniques to restrict access. Hence, linking is a “speech act”. It is the opinion of the TAG that linking should therefore enjoy the same protections enjoyed by any other type of protected speech.
Freedom of expression (speech) is a right enshrined under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Countries that adhere to this idea of freedom of expression implement it in differing terms. However, since linking constitues a type of expression, in as much as there is a right to freedom of expression, this right encompasses the right to link.
Page Access might not be Purposeful
The appearance of a page within a browser's cache does not necessarily mean the user purposefully navigated to a page.