Stop Me Before I Link Again
TicketMaster is suing
Sidewalk--Microsoft's online city guide--for linking to its Web site. A
half-dozen big media companies have targeted TotalNEWS with a lawsuit because,
they say, the site is using Web technology to steal their content. Suddenly,
the ease of linking from Web site to Web site, which makes the World Wide Web
so useful, is generating lawsuits that cloud the right to link.
A world
of interconnected information, where readers jump from one document to another,
was first envisioned by engineer Vannevar Bush in 1945. His whirling system of
motors, levers, and microfilm is to the Web what Leonardo da Vinci's
helicopters are to the Chinook CH-47. But you get the idea. Bush disciple Ted
Nelson took the idea to the world of digital computers in 1962, calling his
creation "hypermedia" and dubbing these jumping points "hyperlinks." One early
commercial hypermedia product was HyperCard, released with the Macintosh
computer in 1987. HyperCard allows users to link "stacks" of information
they've written or assembled on computer "notecards." But the true promise of
hypermedia was linking information across a global network, and that had to
wait until 1992 and Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web.
The Web's rapid acceptance owes much to the ease with which
Web pages can be created. And the proliferation of the lawsuits owes much to
the ease with which Web pages can be linked to one another. Creating links is
easy because each Web page, and each image on the page, has a unique address on
the Web called a URL (Universal Resource Locator). For instance, the URL for
this page is http://www.slate.com/webhead/97-06-06/webhead.asp.
To see how this all works,
follow me as I build a Web site containing home page A and image B.
A browser loading home page A
sees that it refers to image B and loads that too, then displays the whole
thing.
The great thing about this scheme is that if
you are on a slow connection to the Internet, you can tell your browser to
ignore the images. This speeds things up quite a bit (click to find out
how).
The bad thing about this
scheme is that since every image has a public URL, anyone can use it. In the
example below, some villain has co-opted image B for his nefarious (and
libelous) ends.
The offending page doesn't technically copy or distribute
the image in question. It just points the user's browser to address B. Some
lawyers think that this may constitute a "public display," similar to illegally
publishing a copyrighted photograph in a newspaper, but this argument remains
untested.
Interestingly, if the page simply provides a hyperlink to the image in
question, the law becomes even murkier. Entertain, for a moment, this scenario:
If we at Slate captured your voicemail recording and played it on our site
without your permission, some lawyers would say that we had violated your
copyright. But if we cited your telephone number instead, we wouldn't be
violating copyright laws--even though Web surfers could hear the same recording
by dialing the number. Hyperlinks are like telephone numbers--but instead of
dialing them, you click on them.
The TicketMaster dispute muddles this point
further. The company is upset not because Sidewalk provided a hyperlink to
TicketMaster's site, but because Sidewalk provided a hyperlink "deep" into
TicketMaster's site. What is "deep"? Well, the page you're looking at is
relatively deep in Slate. To find your way here, you probably typed in Slate's
home page URL, http://www.slate.com. We showed you today's cover, then our table
of contents, and you eventually clicked on the "Webhead" link. But if a friend
gave you the precise URL for this column, you could go directly to it. So, in a
way, the link to this story is a "deep" hyperlink, because it avoids our home
page.
This is
what Sidewalk did: It recorded the URLs of TicketMaster's transaction pages,
where you buy tickets for specific shows. It then placed hotlinks to these URLs
on its own pages that hype various concerts and theatrical productions. This
angered TicketMaster because it allowed potential purchasers of tickets to
avoid ads and promotions on TicketMaster's home page and all the intermediate
pages you must visit before you can buy a ticket. Returning to my voicemail
analogy, it's as if I cited not only your telephone number, but also the code
to skip your clever message (hint: on most voicemail systems, press "#"). While
this may not be friendly, it doesn't seem like a violation of
intellectual-property law.
While the lawsuit proceeds, TicketMaster and Sidewalk have
exchanged some entertaining technological volleys. Click for a brief account of
these.
Just as a Web page can
include an image by citing that image's URL, so also can it include another Web
page by citing that page's address. This technique is called "framing." I
framed pages in my last Webhead to compare search results from various search services.
Slate's lawyer tells me this sort of framing doesn't violate anyone's copyright
(phew!). It's called "fair use," and is comparable to the quotation of a short
passage of a book in a review.
So why did the news sites sue
TotalNEWS? See for yourself. When you click to TotalNEWS, a column of icons for
several news sites appears down the left side of the page. If you click, say,
USA Today , up pops the USA Today Web site, but inside a frame.
TotalNEWS' advertisement remains visible. This definitely isn't "fair use." If
courts decide that such framing constitutes a "public display," or even that it
causes confusion in the market ("unfair competition"), then TotalNEWS is
violating intellectual-property law.
As we go to press, TotalNEWS
has settled out of court. For details, see this June 6 Wired
News story.
