Another lure was dropped in the sea of deeplinking cases this month when a federal judge in Texas enjoined an internet site from providing deep links to motorcycle racing podcasts.   The injunction involved SFX Motor Sports and www.supercrosslive.com,  an internet site that provides services to the supercross racing community. The site's operator, Robert Davis, used his site to link to audiocasts copyrighted by SFX Motor Sports.  The hyperlinks attached directly to the audio files, bypassing the SFX homepage and its advertising content.

The ruling runs counter to the much ballyhood 2000 case of Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com where a federal judge ruled that hyperlinking does not in and of itself violate the Copyright Act because hyperlinking does not involve copying.  Since the Ticketmaster case, there have been a few cases ruling against deep hyperlinks, but those cases involved linking to content that itself violated copyright law. 

The case presents us with a number of takeaways.  If you are thinking about using a deep linking technique, obtain permission or at least be prepared to remove the link quickly.  If you represent yourself, as Davis did, don't refer to your adversary as Genghis Khan.  If you operate a site and want to avoid deep links to your site, use the many available technical methods to prevent such access rather than relying on someone like Davis to show up in court unrepresented.   And, of course, if you lose, at least use the decision to garner as much publicity for your site as possible.   (Fish Image Courtsey of Rowanx)