Court Ruling Raises Concern Regarding Website Linking Policy

Are you a marketer running a website or blog? Does your site include links to other sites? Did you ask permission for those links? If your answer to the last question is something like “Ask for permission! Why?” then you are in good company.  It is an unwritten rule of the web that as long as a web page is publicly available any other website operator can freely to link to it (of course it is another story if a website bypasses password protection to link to materials on another site).  Nearly no one bothers to ask for permission to include a link to a webpage.  But what about other types of content that are not webpages such as audio, video or PDF files?  Are these fair game as well when it comes to linking?

Well, based on a recent court ruling in the US linking without permission for some types of content may be a problem.

According to this article on CNET News.com, a US court ruled a website is not permitted to link directly to audio content contained on another site if the other site doesn’t want the link.  The case deals with a site that links to audiocasts of motorcycle racing that are contained on another site.  In this case the plaintiff (the audiocast content provider) claimed the defendant site was violating its copyright since it linked directly to the audiocast file and not to a webpage that contained a link to the audiocast file.  Because of this the plaintiff claimed the defendant’s link allowed users to bypass a webpage containing sponsor’s advertisements (the defendant’s link page did not contain these ads).

The issue of whether links require permission has been tested in court several times with the most prominent case dealing with Ticketmaster and their suit against a website that was linking to its listings for individual events.  The ruling in this case went against Ticketmaster, who was claiming copyright infringement for any site that linked to anything but Ticketmaster’s front page.

However, the audiocast case may be seen as different since the link in question is not to a webpage but to the actual audiocast file.  In other words, when a visitor clicks on the link an audio player on the visitor’s computer will begin playing the audiocast.  In this way the visitor never sees any part of the content provider’s website.  (Technically the content provider can prevent the defendant’s link from working but for some reason they did not choose to do so.)

Web marketers who link to non-web page files should watch this issue as it is likely to move up the courts.  It may be that not all freely available files found on the web are open to linking without permission.