As any blogger knows, the lifeblood of blogging is linking. The very definition of a lonely blogger is a blogger who does not link. So the merest suggestion that the act of linking could have legal consequences is probably enough to cause a psychotic wind to whistle clean through the blogosphere.

Relax. There are no legal consequences to linking. Not yet, anyway. But things did look a little dicey when Ticketmaster.com decided to sue Microsoft in 1997 (Ticketmaster v. Microsoft, United States District Court for the Central District of California, Civil Action Number 97-3055DPP) over the issue of 'deep linking', i.e. linking not direct to the Ticketmaster home page but a booking page embedded deep within the Ticketmaster.com website. Ticketmaster claimed that, because Microsoft was bypassing their homepage, they were losing out on valuable advertising revenue.

The case was settled in 1999 when Microsoft agreed to link to the Ticketmaster.com homepage and, as a result, no substantive legal ruling was made on the issue. Had there been one it would almost certainly have had significance in the UK because legal precedents (especially those involving technology and the internet) have a knack of drifting over jurisdictional boundaries like radioactive fallout.

But, for now at least, we can link away. However, commercial bloggers would be well advised not to do so with gay abandon. There is no rule against 'deep linking' yet but it is feckless to imagine that the beneficiaries of 'eyeball-driven' revenue are not going to be motivated to protect their cash-cows.

I wholly expect that this issue is going to come before the Courts again either in Britain or the USA at some time in the future and commercial bloggers might be advised to just bear this in mind. Right now, I would suggest that best practice is to continue linking to embedded pages but try to include a link to the relevant homepage in the same posting.

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