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> The suing company claims that their approach and the links they selected are
> copyrighted. In my opinion, the first claim amounts to copyrighting an idea
> that has been in the field for fifty years and is recorded in numerous
> textbooks--without copyright problems. The second part, the links, is a little
> trickier, I don't know to what extent the sued company's site used the same
> order, descriptions or groupings. I do know that any link list on this topic
> created by two different people would have extensive overlap. The sued company
> didn't want a legal battle and so chose to redo their site.
A simple list of links is no more "copyrightable" than a simple list of
street addresses or phone numbers. Any original content (such as
descriptions of the sites) would be protected by copyright, but not just
a list of facts (which is all a list of URLs is).
