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Judge Rules Deep Hyperlinking OK
SEWilco writes "In this USA Today story a judge ruled that hyperlinking is not illegal as long as consumers understand whose site they are on and that one company has not simply duplicated another's page. " The case stems from Ticketmaster suing Tickets.com for deep-linking within Ticketmaster. Very good ruling for the health of the Web.
The only thing missing from the ruling is the judge didn't also rule that Ticketmaster is *the* company most deserving of a Justice Department anti-trust investigation.
Oh well, maybe next time.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
...its like posting a sign in your front lawn with a note attached that said "if you don't own this house, then you'd *better* not be looking here".
.edu and .mil. Its .com that are the new-comers. And what a culture clash it has created!
Ticketmaster's claim was obscene, too, but they are a company. Corporate greed tends to overshadow reason. Universities, though? They shouldn't be motivated by the same factors as companies, and they should be more knowledgable about what it means to be on the internet.
After all, in the early days, the internet was pretty much all
--Lenny
Tickets.com sends the deep link through a URL rewriter which nullifies the referrer header. It's not a good idea to block everyone with null referrer headers because many corporate browsers and proxies strip these headers.
If you don't want people to deep link. Only accept external referers for the home page.
I realize this requires a bit more overhead, but for christ sake, why sue over something that can be stopped with a technical tweak.
-josh
"Please, PLEASE don't let anyone know about our school! We have too much interest as it is! When will you people learn that our staff will enjoy their jobs sooooooooo much more if no-one can look us up on a search engine, be referred to us by alumni or get any info about us at all! We are trying to cut our student body down to zero, so our staff no longer has to put out any effort, and can spend their days in idle luxury."
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Maybe because different ticket outlets have access to different events?
I dunno about you, but as a consumer, I like having the diversity... if I do a search on Amazon for a book, and it doesn't carry it, I'd love it if they linked to another bookstore, as long as the other bookstore did have it...
All in the name of customer service!
As long as your competitor offers different service than yours, it doesn't hurt you to acknowledge them. It only highlights the differences; it's up to you, as a provider, to make sure the differences aren't negative in your direction, I think!
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
You make some good points, but I think you missed a critical one. Ticketmaster, rather than paying some techies to FIX the problem, paid some lawyers to file a frivoulous suit that had no merit, and which could have set a very dangerous precedent, had the judge and appeals court been clueless (this is ENTIRELY possible; read a random sampling of early decisions related to the internet). Ticketmaster's behavior was like me using a .50 caliber machine gun to shoot your dog when it craps on my lawn. Sure, I'm justified in doing SOMETHING, but I did the wrong thing and endangered a lot of uninvolved people.
In fact I hope everyone emails the Executive Director of University Relations.
Perhaps we could ask if we can link to the page about the "Linux Demo Day" they are having on April 5th.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Make sure you are coming from a university site too. Note that the difference between the two links that makes it work is the addition of a "www" before "guru". The other link is for usage only by staff *within* the university.
BTW, there are *certain* sites that have a "blanket exemption" to link into Penn State's pages: search engines.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Okay, if Ticketmaster.com, the web version of a larger corporate business, is an "open site", then what is a closed site? Intranet?
/foo/bar.html, then it's "closed". Of course if you link to /foo/bar.html and it says, "Hey! You didn't pay us!" then deep linking isn't a problem, because then only the subscribers can follow the deep links.
If it's designed for the general public to use, (i.e. any random website), then it's open. If it's backbehind a firewall it would be a "closed" site. (Of course you shouldn't even know about this site outside the firewall, but you get the idea.) I would go as far as to say that if it's a subscription only site that for some bizare reason only authenticates at the index.html, but not at
So in short, it's "open" unless someone screwed up REALLY badly, then it's "closed" so that they can cover their ass.
Very good ruling for the health of the Web.
/. and the various other (cringe) weblogs out there.
And a VERY good ruling for
Glad to see this isn't going to be another problem lawsuit. If a site doesn't want people deep linking there are plenty of technological ways to prohibit it, legislation is not necessary.
--
+&x
(I talked about this in the Ask Slashdot about the 'Death of the Net As We Know It, and I'm rehashing now.)
What we need to do is set up a briefing packet for Congress. All of them. Discussions of the flaws in the DMCA, of UCITA, of the attacks on DeCSS and on anti-filtering. Logical, reasoned arguments against what's there already. Maybe sponsored by the EFF. Or a made-up think-tank with a grandiose title. (Sure, let's USE the ideas that work! We'll Open Source some political tricks!)
Any interest? I'd work on it, but I'm not sure I want to do it all by myself. I'd need some fact checkers, and some editors.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
As others have noted, the NY Times does exactly this, and it prevents access without registering and therefore seeing all the main banner pages.
Or they could simply look for a cookie, and if it isn't there, simply throw up a screen saying "Welcome to Ticketmaster!" that then loads the target url after 15 seconds. They wouldn't even need to enforce registration, then. Then only create the cookie in the main page and change that hourly. No one has to change an URL, yet everyone is fully aware that they are entering ticketmaster's site.
How much coding time would that take? How much did their lawyers charge?
The cake is a pie
I agree, it's a shady practice, and fraudulent misrepresentation.
But couldn't this be solved by having a standard logo/footer on every page that says "TICKETMASTER" or the equivalent? Then who cares if someone deep links you in a frame. Nobody's going to believe the page belongs to anybody but you.
Constitutionally Correct
Much of your cut comes from advertising revenue. You skip the hard work of building a large database (of events or tickets in this case), but still have a lot of click-through to show potential advertisers. Also you get people hooked on your site before your development is finished - I'm sure tickets.com eventually wants to build up the capability that ticketmaster has, but doesn't want to wait that long to develop a customer base.
Good decision on the ruling, it will make things easier on us poor web-builders. But one question on the article...
''They are an open site and are a member of the free Internet community,'' Tickets.com attorney Daniel Harris said of Ticketmaster. ''They have to live by the rules of that community as it has grown up.'
Okay, if Ticketmaster.com, the web version of a larger corporate business, is an "open site", then what is a closed site? Intranet? And what's this "free internet community"? Everytime the Internet community tries to get something for free (ie. mp3) there's a big hullabaloo and somebody gets sued. Twice.
And who says Tickemaster.com is a member of *any* community? They're a business, they want to make money, not talk with people. Also I've never read any "rules" about hyperlinking, and doubt any exist.
A good court ruling, a really, really dopey quote at the end. Thankfully he didn't pipe this stuff in court, else they could have lost.
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"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
that I can still use a hyperlink? A shortcut to another file, presumably on another web site? Gosh, what will the government uphold next, the ability to use ASCII characters? I mean, it's getting a little absurd when TicketMaster is trying to sue somebody for linking to them. /. better be careful, USAToday might get mad about linking to that story. Don't get me wrong, I think the judge made the best decision possible in this case, but this is just another example of the e-lawsuit ad absurdum.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
It has been perfectly acceptable for car manufactures to quote their competitions product, price, and features for years. They are providing information about a competing product, the same information any consumer could get. By providing a link, you are doing the same thing. The only potential abuse for this is to claim their work as your own, a simple disclaimer ought to take care of that.
I think that various commercial websites have figured out ways around deep linking, anyway. You just, via perl script or something, rename the deeper pages every day or so, but also rename the links within the pages, so the site links together as before, but only the front page retains a persistant name. Hey, TicketMaster! For half of what you're paying your lawyers I'll save you from that mean ol' tickets.com.
Uh, yeah.
"various commerical websites". Not that I patronize these web sites, you understand. They just tend to be at the forefront of, uh, 'agressive html design'.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
To:Ziff-Davis Publishing
From:United States Dept. of Justice
We have examined your website www.zdtv.com and have found that it is a special case.Our rulling on hyperlinking on a page doesn't apply to your extensively and seemingly arbitrarily hyperlinked pages.As a result we have consulted the geek community at large and have determined that your sentence is one(1) bombardment aka 'Slashdot Effect'This sentence is effective immediately.
Have a nice day.
The penguins have revolted...Visit The UPGR
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Thus Spake ComradePenguin
Presumably ticketmaster.com still doesn't LIKE deep-linking (despite being forced to accept it). So what if they implement a technical solution (of which there are many, some already mentioned here)? We still lose the feature of deep interconnectivity but I'm sure there's no legal recourse: "Hey judge! Make them let us deep link!"
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
[disclaimer: I'm a former employee of TMCS]
I certainly agree that we don't want to make
hyperlinking illegal but before you all go overboard with the Ticketmaster bashing, let me give you a little bit of background on this one.
Tickets.com was doing more than just hyperlinking. They were basically pretending that the content to which they were linking was their own. It's sort of like Slashdot linking to stories on cnn.com, zdnet.com, etc. (like it does) but all the while framing this content within their own site and never acknowledging that it is ticketmaster.com's content, other than a tiny little fine-print tag that tells the customer that they are buying this ticket from an some "other site". The effect is, customers think they are buying the ticket from tickets.com, not Ticketmaster.com
This is a pretty shady practice on the part of tickets.com. Here is why they did this: they want to be able to tell venues allied with Ticketmaster, "Hey, look, we sell tickets to every venue in the US!" in order to win over Ticketmaster's venue customers.
''They are an open site and are a member of the free Internet community,''
/all/ companies and individuals that join our `little' world would abide by that simple statement all our grief and woe would be unheard of. That's the way it's suppose to be, no?
Tickets.com attorney Daniel Harris said of Ticketmaster. ''They have to live
by the rules of that community as it has grown up.''
If only
ObOnTopicPost:
This is a very good thing IMHO has it vindicates the way hypertext and the net is set up. Free form, stream of thought linking. Make that illegal and our whole net falls apart.
Sgt Pepper