Archives for August 2004

Emerging Legal Guidance on ‘Deep Linking’

By Margaret Smith Kubiszyn

Summary: The practice of “deep linking” — when one web site links to a page deep within another site — has been a great source of controversy in the Internet community. Although at least one case failed to find this practice illegal, it remains an unclear area of Internet law. This article explains why.

Author: The author of this article, Margaret Smith Kubiszyn, is a member of the GigaLaw.com Editorial Board and practices patent, trademark, copyright and computer law as an associate at the law firm Bradley Arant Rose & White LLP in Birmingham, Alabama. She is a registered member of the U.S. Patent Bar and has written on various Internet law topics. E-mail: mkubiszyn@barw.com.

The Deep-Linking Debate

The practice of “deep linking” — when one site links to a page of another site other than the other site’s home page — has been a great source of controversy in the Internet community. The issues regarding the legality and propriety of deep linking, while hotly debated, have yet to be resolved with any definitive standards or rules. While many companies have contested the deep-linking practices of others, Ticketmaster has become the driving force in compelling a resolution of this issue. A recent decision by a Los Angeles district judge has been touted as the end-all to the deep-linking dilemma. However, although this decision does offer some guidance, it hardly ends the debate.

Linking itself is vital to the structure of the Internet. It is a rare web site indeed that contains no links to other sites or is not linked to by other sites. Links make the web manageable to surfers, enabling users to easily find useful information on topics of interest. So-called deep links are links to an interior page of a web site. By deep-linking into a site, the linking site allows the user to bypass the home page of the linked site, a page that often contains advertising, terms and conditions and proprietary information relevant to the use of the linked site.

Linkers argue that deep linking is simply in line with the free nature of the web, that anyone who creates a web page in effect grants the entire cyber community an implied license to link to that page. Besides, the linkers contend, they are actually doing the linked sites a favor by driving users to the linked site.

On the other hand, linked sites, especially commercial web sites, are crying foul. They believe that they should have the right to control how users experience their web sites, and that they could lose advertising revenue if surfers are linked to an interior page instead of an ad-ridden home page. Moreover, they contend that users may not even realize that they have been relocated to a new web site.

In essence, this is the same conflict we see over and over in dealing with Internet issues – the free-wheeling, “anything goes” cyber-culture fighting the evolution of the Internet into a commercial medium for companies intent on protecting their brands and corporate images.

Ticketmaster v. Microsoft

The first major case involving the practice of deep linking involved Microsoft’s use of deep links from its “Sidewalk” web guides. These web guides spotlighted, among other things, upcoming events in a particular area, and would provide deep links to information on specific events on interior pages of the Ticketmaster web site.

At that time, Ticketmaster had recently signed an agreement to provide event information and ticket-ordering links to a competing web guide service, CitySearch. Through this agreement, CitySearch was paying Ticketmaster for what Microsoft was taking for free. Tickemaster filed suit against Microsoft on April 28, 1997, arguing that Microsoft’s practices devalued Ticketmaster’s site by bypassing its home page.

The case, which was closely watched by Internet experts hoping for some clear guidance on linking policies, settled in February 1999. In the settlement, Microsoft agreed not to provide deep links to Ticketmaster’s site, agreeing instead to link only to the Ticketmaster home page. Following this settlement, Ticketmaster allowed deep linking by sites such as Yahoo and Knight-Ridder, but only after the parties had entered into a linking agreement.

Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com

Once again, Ticketmaster took the lead toward resolution of the deep-linking issues by filing suit against Tickets.com in July 1999. Tickets.com could be characterized as a competitor of Ticketmaster, acting as a clearinghouse for tickets, linking to sources for tickets to events (including links to Ticketmaster), auction services and premium ticket brokers. Ticketmaster alleged that, in addition to deep linking into Ticketmaster’s site, Tickets.com copied material from the Ticketmaster site and posted false information about the availability of tickets from Ticketmaster.

Tickets.com filed a motion to dismiss Ticketmaster’s complaint. Once again, industry experts were watching the case, waiting for a clear resolution of the deep-linking issues.

In October 1999, Ticketmaster issued a statement on its web site outlining the types of linking that it considers acceptable, such as consensual linking, and those it does not, such as linking “for distinctly commercial reasons” beyond navigation. Ticketmaster called for distinctions to be made in linking debates such as the extent of linking, motivation of the linking site, and the status of the linking site as a competitor or ally.

Ticketmaster contended that it filed suit against Tickets.com because the Ticketmaster pages “represent the relationships Ticketmaster and Ticketmaster Online have built with venues, acts, teams, promoters, and [] ticket buyers over more than 20 years,” and that Tickets.com was “attempting to build one business on the back of another, plain and simple.”

On March 27, 2000, U.S. Judge District Judge Harry Hupp issued a ruling dismissing four counts of Ticketmaster’s complaint, including some counts involving deep linking. In dismissing the first claim, which alleged copyright infringement, Judge Hupp stated: “[H]yperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act (whatever it may do for other claims) since no copying is involved. The customer is automatically transferred to the particular genuine web page of the original author. 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.”

Judge Hupp also dismissed Ticketmaster’s claim for breach of contract, which alleged that, by using the Ticketmaster site, Tickets.com was bound by the terms and conditions on the Ticketmaster home page that prohibited deep linking, and that Tickets.com breached this provision by deep linking to the Ticketmaster site. Judge Hupp dismissed the claim, stating that Ticketmaster’s complaint set forth no facts indicating that Tickets.com knew of or agreed to these terms.

Judge Hupp also denied the motion to dismiss Ticketmaster’s claim of unfair competition, noting that the allegations that Tickets.com falsely implied an association with Ticketmaster and gave misleading information about Ticketmaster could possibly support such a claim. Judge Hupp rejected the argument that allegations of deep linking could support a claim of unfair competition, however, stating that: “The complaint also alleges deep linking as an example of unfair competition, but the court concludes that deep linking by itself (i.e. without confusion of source) does not necessarily involve unfair competition.”

So, Where Are We?

Although the news reports on the Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com case have enthusiastically proclaimed that the controversy is over, that deep linking is okay, Judge Hupp’s ruling hardly lays forth a road map telling us when we can, and, more importantly, when we cannot, deep link. Clearly, Judge Hupp leaves open the possibility for a claim of copyright infringement and unfair competition in cases where the user could be confused as to the source of content or be oblivious to the fact that he had been linked into the interior of another site.

In the majority of the instances of deep linking — where there is no confusion as to source, where the user knows he has been transported into another site — is deep linking always okay? Probably not. It is highly unlikely that a single, short opinion on a motion to dismiss will conclusively determine the issues involved in deep linking. The concerns expressed in Ticketmaster’s October statement regarding deep linking have merit.

Much as in cases involving such issues as framing and meta-tagging, issues of fairness will inevitably factor into the resolution of the deep-linking dilemma. Factors such as the status and motives of the linking site are bound to enter into future court decisions.

The Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com case is important, but we are a long way from a definitive road map on how and when we can employ deep linking.

This article was originally published on GigaLaw.com in May 2000

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You like power because it increases your sexual options. You are JFK. You are a thrill seeker by nature and don’t shy away from risky behavior.



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You are Raiders of the Lost Ark. You live for adventure, fortune hunting and danger.



I can live with these. Don’t know if they are meaningful, but I’ll take it.

I took a Quizzila test and this is the result

You are Tigger! T – I – DOUBLE G – R! You are happy and bouncy and insane and busy and running and falling and hungry and talking and leading and showing and… Gods, you’re annoying, but everyone seems to like you – at least, for a while.



How exciting. If you want to try the test you can at

http://quizilla.com/users/Eeyoar/quizzes/Which%20Winnie%20the%20Pooh%20character%20are%20you?/

How do visually impaired people dream?

Diego Kaski poses an interesting question

“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Despite recent advances in the understanding of sleep, dreams continue to bewitch us with their unfathomed mysteries. Dreaming occurs during paradoxical sleep, a stage in which people’s eyes move rapidly under the eyelids, and is therefore also known as rapid eye movement sleep.

As we know from our own dreams, what we dream reflects our waking life experiences, which are mostly visual in nature. Are the content of visually impaired people’s dreams related to their lack of vision? Do they have visual images while dreaming? Indeed, how do visually impaired people dream?

The content of dreams

Dreaming can be considered to be a passive event, a phenomenon that we experience but do not consciously control. When dreaming it can be said that we are mere onlookers of an unfolding drama. Nevertheless, some people claim to have “lucid” dreams – where they are aware of dreaming and are able to control the events of the dream. The content of a dream resembles what we experience in everyday life when we are awake.

Usually, dreams are visual and mostly in colour (61%, but this proportion increases with longer dreams). Auditory and visual imageries are the most common sensations present in dreams (found in 76% and 100% of dreams respectively).1 External sounds can be incorporated, but on the odd occasion that dreamers speak of entirely auditory experiences, they tend to claim that they were not asleep at all. Other sensations, such as taste and smell, are not as common.

Most dream settings are familiar, and most of the people that appear in dreams are known to the dreamer (apparently, celebrities crop up only rarely). So, if the content of dreams are a reflection of waking life, it follows that the dream content of people with physical conditions, such as visual handicap, must be related to their physical condition, in this case the absence of vision.

Therefore, do visually impaired people who are afflicted from birth lack visual imagery and rapid eye movements in their dreams?

Dream content in the visually impaired

People who are visually impaired from birth (congenitally visually impaired) seem to lack visual imagery and rapid eye movements in their dreams. 2 3 The majority of the people who became visually impaired before they were aged 5 or 7 will have no visual dreams, but if sight is lost after the age of 7 visual imagery is retained in dreams into adulthood, with rapid eye movements present during sleep.2,4,5

With few exceptions, when visual handicap occurs between the critical ages of 5 and 7, visual imagery remains for varying periods of time, even in adulthood, and tends to get worse over time. Although it is thought that rapid eye movements are essential for visual dreams,2,6 it seems that many congenitally visually impaired people show eye movements during rapid eye movement sleep periods despite having no visual imagery.

With the exception of the absence of vision, the dreams of those who became visually impaired before the age of 5 are no different in most aspects to those of the sighted, containing perceptions of sounds, touch, taste, smell, and temperature sensations (in decreasing order).2,7 As depicted in the example of a dream of a congenitally visually impaired person, heard speeches and conversations are prominent in visually impaired people’s dreams: “I was going up to heaven and St Peter barred me at the gates, telling me to go down below. I argued with him, feeling I was being treated unjustly, until he said: ‘All your friends are down there’; whereupon I said, ‘If that’s the case it’s fine,’ and I went down below.”3 It may seem surprising that taste and smell form such a minor part of dreams, given their importance to visually impaired people.

Visual imagery and dreams

For most sighted people dream images are predominantly visual in nature. Visual imagery, however, is not the only means by which we can represent our surroundings. Just as when they are awake, visually impaired people can be conscious of their surrounding space while dreaming, through sensations other than touch.

For example, a congenitally visually impaired person, dreaming that he or she is in a room, may be aware of the size and shape of the room, without describing, touching, or walking around in it. It is interesting that although visually impaired people may have different sensory experiences than sighted people they may express what they perceive using the same visual terminology as the sighted. The dream reports of visually impaired subjects can therefore be difficult to interpret.

For the sighted, the visual component of imagery is its most noticeable feature, so it is difficult for those of us with sight to consider images and imagery without using visual metaphor or analogy. Yet much of the work that has been carried out on dreams of the visually impaired underlines the need for a broader definition of imagery – one that is not so strongly bound to the visual processing system.

Diego Kaski third year medical studentRoyal Free and University College London Medical Schooldiego@talk21.com

Snyder F. The phenomenology of dreaming, 1970. Cited in: Ellman SJ, Antrobus JS, eds. The mind in sleep: psy- chology and psychophysiology. New York:Wiley, 1991.

Berger RJ, Olley P, Oswald I. The EEG, eye-movements and dreams of the blind. Q J Exp Psychol 1962;14:183-6.

Blank HR. Dreams of the blind. Psychoanal Q 1958;27:158-74.

Jastrow J. The dreams of the blind. New Princeton Review 1880;5:19-34.

Heermann G. Beobachtungen und Betrachtungen uber die Traume der Blinden. Ein Beitrag zur Physiologie und Psychologie der Sinne Monatschrift fur Medzin. Augen-heikkunde und Chirurgie 1838;I:116-80. Cited in Blank HR. Dreams of the blind. Psychoanal Q 1958;27:158-74.

Offencrantz W, Wolpert E. Clinical studies of sequential dreams. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1963;8:497-508.

Amadeo M, Gomez E. Eye movements, attention, and dreaming in subjects with lifelong blindness. Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 1966;11:501-7.

As a child there are so many little things that you cannot do because you are too young, too little, too this or too that. You hate taking naps because there is so much to do. You hate being too young because you are convinced that you are old enough to do whatever the bigger kids/people are doing.

Now that I am an adult, well I have an adult body I find that there are things that I miss from my childhood. I miss endless Summer days. I miss the endless Summer nights of my adolescence and early 20s. I miss taking naps and I miss being invulnerable. Nothing could stop me, nicks, scrapes and bruises slowed me down, but they didn’t stop me.

And the reality is that now they don’t stop me either, but I feel their effects much longer than ever before. The impact that they have is that they turn into nagging little injuries that just suck energy and take forever to go away, or so it seems.

This is not something that I wanted to aspire to grow up to enjoy, but I suppose that it is just a part of getting older. In the last 18 years I can name almost a dozen peers who have died from cancer, traffic accidents or some other “event” so I’ll take the nagging aches and pains. But I won’t go down without a fight.

Can you sit in a room and say nothing and be comfortable. I can. I can think of many times in which my father, grandfather and I have shared extended periods of silence. There hasn’t been anything of consequence to say and there was nothing uncomfortable with sharing the moment.

In a world of clutter and chaos silence is a gift that we all too often miss out on. And some people simply cannot handle it. I can be very gregarious, quite verbose. I can be the life of the party and then I can go the other direction. Many years ago I was told by a lady who was no longer interested in sharing time with me that I can suck the energy out of the room by merely walking in.

As if I had that power. Although in that particular case I suppose that I did because she gave it to me, but that is a topic for a different time. What her biggest issue at that time was that I could simply shut down and listen without responding.

Shut down may be too extreme. I heard everything that was said and I would react with a nod or twinkle of my eye. But sometimes there is no point in vocally responding to everything that is said. If you can stop and just listen you can get in touch with yourself and the world around you.

And I think that scares some people. I have said it many times and I’ll say it again. I can look in the mirror of my soul and smile back at the light and the darkness that resides in there. I am comfortable with who I am because I have taken time to learn who that is. And I accept that man is continually evolving. If you knew me at 18 and expect to find that 18 year-old still living here, he is gone.

Parts of him remain, bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam float to the surface and he appears. Echoes of who I was remain as do the 5 and 10 year-old boy and the 25 year-old man I once was. I don’t know who I am going to become and I don’t mind. I only know that I have an oar in the water and that I am steering the boat through the storm.

Now provided I manage not to turn a three hour tour into a shipwreck I’ll be ok. OTOH, if I do manage to wreck the boat I wonder who my professor and Mary-Anne will be. 😉