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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.
Okay, if Ticketmaster.com, the web version of a larger corporate business, is an "open site", then what is a closed site? Intranet?
:) That's the way it is.
:)
/was/ dopey :)
An open site is ANY site put out on the net, so yes you got it, a closed site is the Intranet, if you don't want to deal with the people in your town then don't leave your house.
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.
Free as in speech not beer.
And who says Tickemaster.com is a member of *any* community? They're a business, they want to make money, not talk with people.
Ticketmaster.com is most assuredly a memeber of a community. Any group of people in a single place can be considered a community and business help make that community. You might as well try to get away with saying that Churches want to save souls not talk to people.
Also I've never read any "rules" about hyperlinking, and doubt any exist.
There is such a thing as "Common Law" and Common Law says that you are able to link to ANY sites freely and are in fact incouraged to do so. I wonder how many of ticket.com's customers decided to poke around ticketmaster.com's site after they were taken to it. Quite a number I bet.
A good court ruling, a really, really dopey quote at the end.
Okay, okay you win that one...it
Sgt Pepper
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