I’m not a lawyer, but my father and my sister are both intellectual property lawyers. So, I’ve picked up a little over the dinner table.

Copyrights protect the expression of an idea. When content is copywritten, it means that the owner wishes to retain the rights to that expression.

When you talk about “protecting copyright material”, you could either be referring to (a) the elements that contribute to the unique expression of the material, thus making it copyrightable or (b) the act of enforcing the copyright (such as the placement of a copyright notice).

Theoretically, breadcrumbs could be (a). Years ago, Lotus won a lawsuit against Borland because Borland violated the copyright of Lotus 1-2-3 by copying the menus for it’s own spreadsheet (Quattro Pro). One could argue that the breadcrumbs are like menus in that the information architecture is an expression of the idea of how you’ve chosen to implement the information — someone else could be creative and implement their own way.

But, as I understand copyright law, one of the protections is that someone could express the content a different way. If there’s only one way to organize the information (such as their might only be one way to list the ingredients of an apple pie), then the expression is not as protected as situations where there is a lot of author license and freedom of expression.

For (b), I don’t see immediately how breadcrumbs would act to actually protect a copyright. I don’t see how you’d march in front of a judge and say, “Sir, we have breadcrumbs so, therefore, they aren’t allowed to copy this.”

Of course, my amatuer knowledge of copyright only extends to US copyright law (where it represents facts at all). I have no clue about how copyright works anywhere else.

Could you offer some opinions on whether you think that breadcrumbs can be used to protect copyright material?

Keith agrees with Jared, using pages about teleportation as examples.

Not all sites have a huge amount of teleporting. Sites behind firewalls or content stored in databases may not fall victim to that at all.

We recommend to our clients that they look at their logs and see what the entry pages are. Only where you’re seeing a lot of non-home-page entry points, do you want to think about that context for breadcrumbs.