Company Threatened Blogger to Remove Their Link, Claiming it Caused material financial lossesselfnews Post That is exactly what happened to blogger Christine at Big Pink Cookie for ablog post that was critical of the company Guardlex. According an article at Hubspot: Although, the pretense for the threat was a copyright claim, the company explained that the outgoing link from the blog hurt the company due to search engine penalties resulting from the links originating under your control. However, BigPinkCookie is the furthest thing from a spammy website. Its a personal blog with an impressive Google PageRank 5, which means Google has deemed its content quite valuable, and links from that type of blog are typically very desirable for search engine optimization purposes. there is no infringement of anything in merely linking to one site from another case law exists on this. We absolutely will not instruct our users to remove links that violate no statute or our terms of service. Whether they choose to do it on their own is entirely up to them, her hosting company wrote in response to Guardlex. This case displays the insane level that some companies will go to in claiming that unwanted links to their website represents intellectual property problems. But, disturbingly, some authorities agree with this concept. Last year the Department of Homeland Security preemptively seized websites merely for linking to copyrighted material. As odd as this scenario seems, it may be something we see more of in the future with companies like Guardlex(this link will probably land us a threatening letter too) needing to justify funding an Anti-Piracy Department for Intellectual Property protection services. In fact, this is already being proposed in new legislation that indicates a backdoor return of SOPA by empowering IP czars with diplomatic status, thereby creating an army of government copyright trolls. Clearly, as is the case with repeated legal judgements against copyright trolls such as Righthaven and others, this latest case is an exasperating attempt to use the legal system as an attack dog against free speech and the Internet itself. The good news is that bloggers, site owners, and hosting companies alike have previous case law to support their freedom. It would be wise, then, to stand ones ground against any company attempting to rewrite the rules through intimidation and force. If the floodgates are ever opened to permit the criminalization of merely referencing openly available material especially unwanted criticism the concept of a free market of ideas could be lost forever. Read other articles by selfnews Post HERE 