Slashdot Mirror
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.
[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