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Are Deep (direct) Links Legal?

December 08, 2004

Wired News: Site Barks About Deep Link By Farhad Manjoo

"Deep links" point to specific content within a site, allowing readers to bypass the site's front page. Instead of linking to a specific article within The Dallas Morning News's site, Belo wants Adelman to only link to the site's main page. ...

"Any proper links to the Belo content should be directly hyperlinked to The Dallas Morning News homepage located at www.dallasnews.com."

The letter specifically referenced an article Adelman had written on Feb. 14, 2002, which pointed to two Morning News articles.

Belo says that those links "can result in a viewer not understanding that the content is on our client's site" and, more importantly, "allows the viewer to avoid the advertising, etc., on the homepage (which places our client in a bad position with respect to its advertisers, etc.)."

As a point of contention between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of the public, "deep linking" seemed to go away for the past two years, after a federal judge declared it kosher.

"Hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act," U.S. District Judge Harry Hupp said in that ruling, which pitted Tickets.com against Ticketmaster. "There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library's card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently."

But the issue seems to have been resurrected, much to the chagrin of many small-time Web publishers.