In 2000, a federal district judge, Harry L. Hupp, dismissed four of Ticketmaster's counts, including some that involved deep linking. He issued what appeared to be a clear victory for deep linkers, saying that the act itself does not violate copyright law because no copying exists. He also argued that linking itself "is analagous to using a library's card index to get reference to particular items." Exactly, I thought. He gets it.

However, many Web site purveyors don't agree, and Hupp did not preclude sites from posting a contract that forbids deep linking. Still, corporate Web sites continued to protest. Later that year, the Albuquerque Journal tried unsuccessfully to charge $50 for the right to deep link to its articles. The Dallas Morning News, in May 2002, demanded that a Texas news site immediately remove all deep links. The newspaper claimed copyright infringement, customer confusion, and interference with advertising.

The antilinking frenzy hasn't stopped at purely commercial ventures, either. The online community went wild this spring when National Public Radio (NPR) introduced a remarkably strict linking policy that forbade any link to any part of its site without written permission. Web heads were horrified--this was National Public Radio, after all, funded with a few tax dollars and our hard-won donations, and long had it been considered a self-proclaimed bastion of journalistic freedom and noncommercialism.

Within days and after incredible online outcry, NPR recanted. The public radio network replaced its draconian link request form with a terms of use page (which, presumably, I can link to without fear). The new page reserves the right to withdraw linking permission for what it deems inappropriate use, but it now "encourages and permits links to content on NPR Web sites."

Nevertheless, the attempts to stop the practice keep coming. The legal landscape in the United States, at least, has thus far favored the RIAA and laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It seems frightfully clear that current copyright law is either ill-equipped or not inclined to help out the deep linkers among us. The Internet presents so many options for copy disbursement that it's harder than ever to control or even define the terms of infringement. And what's the Web without links? Nothing but empty cyberspace.