Do you have permission to link to that site?
In an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Memphis attorney Mark Field had the following caution:
If you have a blog and you start linking to new sites, you have to ask yourself if you have a right to do that linking. In order to avoid violating someone’s copyright, it’s a good idea to have a linkage agreement in place.
It sounds a little bit like lawyers trying to find more ways to make money but is it? It is possible that linking to a website may give rise to allegations of copyright infringement if the proprietor of the site is able to convince a court that the site’s url or address is protected by copyright. Further difficulties may arise where a one site links to a page beneath the home page of another site. This practice is known as “deep linking” and can be very problematic for similar reasons.
When it comes to referencing blogs, deep linking is fairly common place as bloggers routinely link to specific posts on other blogs rather than simply linking to the home page of that blog, for example by creating a link on blog A to blog B. Not only would linking to that site prove problematic but what about tools like trackbacks that create links on a blog back to the originating blog, for example by establishing a trackback on blog A that leaves a link on blog B right back to blog A.
The real question, however, is whether seeking to enforce copyright in a url isn’t perhaps against public policy in the sense that these forms of linking are a big part of the growth and development not only of the Web but a growing subset of the Web, being the blogosphere. If blog and web site proprietors were required to enter into an agreement with the proprietors of other sites just to create links to them (often these links generate traffic to those sites that are linked to and that can result in increased income for that site’s proprietor) then the growth of the blogosphere and the Web as a whole would be fairly effectively stymied.
(Source: LexBlog)
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, blogosphere, deep linking, linking, copyright infringement, uri, url
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