Re: LAW: Legality of deep linking to Web sites

From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@idiom.com)
Date: Thu Jan 18 2001 - 14:47:33 MST


Max More writes:
> Does anyone know what the law says about "deep linking". Say you
> write some comments on an article appearing on a magazine's Web
> page, and you link directly to the article. (The article appears
> in a new browser, exactly as it would appear if the viewer had gone
> there directly.)
>
> What if the magazine sent you a Cease and Desist letter, and told
> you that it did not permitting linking to its content (which is
> freely open to the public), only to its main page?

This situation seems to me to be very simply and obviously
covered by the First Amendment. When you link to someone else,
you are publishing that link. The linkee has no right to
control how you link in your documents that you publish.

Then again, I'm not a lawyer. But I have received such orders
to remove a link to someone else's content in the past. I
explained that if they wanted to break the link, they could do
so by removing their content, but that they had no right to
alter my documents that I was publishing myself. No one has
ever sued me over this.

--
Eric Forste <arkuat@idiom.com>



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