TechCentralStation.Com today posted an article defending the Dallas Morning News’ position banning deep linking. That paper is currently sending out cease and desist notifications to people who deep link to one of its stories. It wants all visitors to be funneled through its front page and required to register before visiting specific stories (that a) this is stupid and b) is technically achievable right now is besides the point).
James Miller argues that web sites have a property interest in specific URLs. According to Miller,
DallasNews.com has recently tried to limit deep links. Deep links bypass an Internet site’s home page and take a reader directly to the interior content. The normally libertarian web community is outraged over the paper’s assertion of its property rights. Property rights, however, confer the ability to exclude, for without exclusion it’s difficult to profit.
. . .
Deep linking has the potential to do vast damage to content providers. Imagine that I create my own table of contents for the New York Times and provide links to interior articles. Let’s say that my site becomes popular and attracts many viewers who used to use the site’s own, advertising-filled, table of contents. My parasite has now deprived the Times of advertising revenue. Other potential online news providers might now be reluctant to start sites because of the fear that similar parasites would eat their profits.
But a deep link is just a URL and what is a URL? An address to a publicly available resource on the web.
Now Miller is arguing that even if I make a resource publicly available, it is still my private property and I should be able to control the distribution of the address — people shouldn’t be able to just willy nilly republish my address if I want to have exclusive control over it.
Which makes about as much sense as saying that I have a property interest in my physical address and can veto any directories or maps that attempt to list or show the location of my house without first getting my permission.
To get back to information, what Miller is arguing for is akin to Newsweek asserting that nobody has a right to cite a specific article in a bibliography. After all, if I post on my web site today that I’ve already read the latest issue of Newsweek and all of the articles sucked except the one on page 32 about deep linking, you can use this knowledge to ignore everything but that single article, thereby depriving Newsweek and its advertisers of having the reader consult Newsweek’s own, official table of contents and/or browsing through the magazine sequentially (and thus viewing the ads that Newsweek and its advertisers depend on).
Certainly it would be possible to create some sort of property rights scheme for deep linking just as it would be possible to create a property rights scheme that would prevent me from telling you which article in Newsweek is worth reading this week. But, it does not seem very efficient to do so in either case (imagine if every annotated bibliography ever published had to seek permission from rights holders before citing and summarizing journal, magazine and newspaper articles.)
I don’t think Miller’s article succeeds at all in making the case that there should be any sort of property interest in normal, everyday deep linking. Certainly some forms of deep linking such as the pervasive linking by a competitor to proprietary business data may warrant attention, as happened with the Ticketmaster case, but granting newspapers a proprietary interest in what is essentially little more than a high tech version of a bibliographical cite doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Source:
Deep links? No way! James D. Miller, TechCentralStation.Com, May 13, 2002.