Tangled Up in Web Links   

When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989, he wanted it to be free and easy to create links — connections from one site to another. Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, thought a vast array of information would then be just a click or two away.

But he may not have expected the interest lawyers and courts would have in links. Who can link to whom? What type of links are acceptable? Can the right to link be licensed? Lawyers are ready to try to come up with answers.

In February, a handful of media companies including Dow Jones, Time Warner, the Washington Post Co. and CNN served papers to the Arizona producers of a site called TotalNEWS (see Bylines, April). Using a linking technique called "framing," TotalNEWS lets users browse the Web pages of dozens of news outlets without leaving TotalNEWS' virtual premises. The case was settled in June when TotalNEWS agreed to stop framing plaintiffs' sites, but was granted a "link license" to continue offering standard links to them.

In April, two less newsy megacorps bumped heads over links in a lawsuit. Ticketmaster claimed Microsoft's local Sidewalk sites misused the ticket company's trademark by linking to its site.

This spate of link litigiousness has many Web watchers troubled. "What makes the Web exciting...is precisely this linking capability," says David Post, a Temple University law professor and codirector of the Cyberspace Law Institute. "I'd want to think very carefully about restricting the ability to link."

TotalNEWS President Roman Godzich says he wanted to avoid affecting other sites. "Our two goals were to make sure TotalNEWS survived, and to not allow this incredibly unlevel playing field to set a precedent," says Godzich, who launched his site in October 1996. Since the case was settled out of court, no precedent was set. But publishers, including USA Today, which previously had given Godzich permission to link by frame to its site, began to ask TotalNEWS to stop framing their sites.

The plaintiffs objected to Godzich's company selling advertising around their editorial content. And they didn't like the way TotalNEWS' ads and navigation buttons consumed much of the user's screen, and how framed links made it unclear who was responsible for a page's contents.

Not all online publishers have a problem with TotalNEWS. Christian Hendricks, president and publisher of Nando.net, the new media division of McClatchy Newspapers, looks at the links to his site as free advertising. "We're aggressively trying to build a brand," he says. "The marketing value of being part of TotalNEWS is greater than the ad value that he's taking away."

Besides, Hendricks says, there are simple ways to thwart frames. "If you don't want them to link, it's almost incumbent on you to stop it," he says. Lines of code inserted into a Web page can prevent it from being framed. Or a simple program can tell a Web server to reject other types of links, which is how Ticketmaster dealt with Microsoft. Ticketmaster's server recognized users who were coming from Sidewalk, refused to accept the link and directed them by return message to the company's home page. Now Sidewalk has stopped funneling users to the site.

Alan Citron, Ticketmaster Multimedia president and chief operating officer, says Microsoft took advantage of his company by directly linking to where users could buy tickets, rather than the home page. "Any company that values its brand and its product is going to have to protect its interests," he says.

Temple University's Post says Ticketmaster's argument may be tough for a court to accept. "The Web is built upon this notion of a link," Post says. "And if you take Ticketmaster seriously, everything sort of collapses under the weight of all this additional negotiation that's required. If everybody has to negotiate every time they're linking, it defeats the purpose of this medium."

So has the flurry of lawsuits over links altered Berners-Lee's vision for the Web? Not yet. Sites can still link to other sites, and even frame them. But Webophiles like Stuart Biegel, a UCLA law professor, are concerned. "What we have is real special here, and we have to be careful," Biegel says of the Web. "We don't want to tinker with it too much because it seems to be working."