The Return of Deep Linking

As promised, here's the return of the Deep Linking issue. The Dallas News website's terms of service include this (among other things):

If you operate a Web site and wish to link to this Site, you may link only to the home page of the Site and not to any other page or subdomain of us.

Although there seem to be relatively clear reasons for asking that sites not frame Dallas News pages in a way that obscure ownership of the original material, a link toward a site (a "cite", technically) should never be understood as more than a reference to another person's works. Even beyond the question of the WWW being founded on the idea of linking among sites (which would be ethically defensible but probably not as easily legally defensible), restricting my ability to point to another site seems to constitute an abridgement of freedom of speech.

But this will be where the whole "shrinkwrap" agreement fiasco will come into play: Dallas News may say that agreeing to use their site constitutes agreement with these principles. (At the same time, who will we weigh Fair Use provisions that explicitly allow critical uses of material?)

Johndan - goto