Ticketmaster Corp., et al. v. Tickets.Com, Inc. was a 2000 case by the United States District Court for the Central District of California finding that deep linking did not violate the Copyright Act of 1976 because it did not involve direct copying. The decision permitted Tickets.com to place deep links to Ticketmaster.
Deep linking, hyperlinking to another website's interior pages, was the subject of considerable controversy in the late 1990s and early 2000s because it allowed consumers to bypass a website's advertising-rich homepage. This could lead to significant financial losses in advertising revenue based on page impressions. In early 1997, Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for unauthorized deep linking to Ticketmaster in its Sidewalk.com website. In February 1999, the case was settled out of court in a non-disclosure agreement that led to Microsoft no longer having deep links to Ticketmaster. In July 1999, Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit against Tickets.com with ten causes of action, including charges that Tickets.com had violated federal copyright laws and violated Ticketmaster's terms and conditions.
In March 2000, ruling on Tickets.com's motion to dismiss U.S. District Judge Harry Lindley Hupp found that deep linking was not prohibited by the Copyright Act because no direct copying had occurred. In August 2000, Hupp denied Ticketmaster's motion for a preliminary injunction against Tickets.com's linking and web crawling. For linking, he wrote that uniform resource locators (URLs) were not copyrightable because they contained only factual and function features, and for web crawling, he wrote that it passed legal muster under the fair use doctrine and did not pose an undue burden on Ticketmaster's servers. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed in a one-paragraph unpublished opinion.
Context
There are two forms of linking: surface linking (which delivers the consumer to the linked website's homepage) and deep linking (which delivers the consumer to a non-homepage link of the website). Websites usually do not object to surface linking because it contributes to a growth in traffic and popularity, which leads to a monetary gain for advertising. Deep linking, on the other hand, has been a magnet for debate because it circumvents the advertising-rich homepage and may lead to lost revenue.
Ticketmaster v. Microsoft
Ticketmaster and Microsoft attempted to forge an agreement to allow Microsoft to have deep links to Ticketmaster. After the talks reached a stalemate and without permission from Ticketmaster, Microsoft used the deep links on its Sidewalk.com website, a Seattle city guide that provided details about future events in the area. Ticketmaster responded by banning incoming requests from the Microsoft links, and Microsoft countered the block by providing links to search engine queries that linked to Ticketmaster pages.
In early 1997, Ticketmaster sued Microsoft because its Sidewalk.com website was linking to pages on Ticketmaster about particular events. The lawsuit, Ashley Dunn wrote in The New York Times, "sent a shiver of anxiety through the online world since it struck at one of the most basic aspects of the Web – the freedom and openness of the hypertext link". Calling Microsoft's deep linking "electronic piracy", Ticketmaster argued that the practice circumvented Ticketmaster's homepage, which had paid advertisements, and led to fewer homepage visits. This could negatively impact Ticketmaster's page impressions-based advertising income. Ticketmaster further asserted that it had contracts permitting other websites to deep link to Ticketmaster; Microsoft's unauthorized deep linking therefore rendered the contracts effectively valueless. In February 1999, Ticketmaster settled the deep linking lawsuit against Microsoft after Microsoft complied with the request to cease the linking. The details of the settlement were subjected to a non-disclosure agreement. After their settlement, Yahoo! and Knight-Ridder signed contracts with Ticketmaster and were given leave to make deep links to Ticketmaster. The New York Timess Bob Tedeschi noted in August 1997 that the Ticketmaster–Microsoft deep-linking case was "closely watched by legal experts because no court has yet ruled on whether deep linking is legal".