"There's a danger free speech will be stifled," Levy said. "If word gets around that you threaten and follow up on threats, people will take your links off their site." Belo did not respond to requests for comment. Levy compares deep linking to the offline act of including citations at the bottom of a research paper. Researchers are allowed to direct people to specific pages of a physical newspaper; in the same way, they should be able to link to the relevant page on a site, he said. "Though the online world and newspapers are different, the same principles ought to apply," he said. Whether such rules will cross into the online world is unclear. In the Danish case, the Danish Newspaper Publishers' Association has asked for a preliminary injunction that would stop Newsbooster from linking to its members' back pages. It's too early to say whether a ruling in the Danish case would have ramifications for the Internet at large. The ruling's effect would largely depend on how broadly the order is worded and whether foreign countries and companies take it into account. The issue is doubly confusing because laws surrounding both deep-linking and Web jurisdiction are still being shaped. Because free-speech laws generally protect criticism or not-for-profit speech, attorneys say a site that links to back pages of a newspaper or publication for the purposes of sharing information may triumph in a court battle. However, the issue is muddier for companies that seek to make money by linking to the pages inside a rival's site. Although companies can cite the Tickets.com victory, attorneys say they must be careful not to violate laws prohibiting deceptive business practices. Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says it's inevitable that someone will bring a deep-linking case where a lot of money is at stake. He said the issue isn't making many waves these days because most companies don't have the manpower or funds to sniff out sites that link to their pages and to file lawsuits against them. But he fears that when the economy turns around, more Web-savvy companies will crack down on deep linking in an effort to shepherd traffic to their ad-laden front doors. "This could potentially break the Web," he said. "The Web is based on linking." Von Lohmann said he hopes courts deciding any future deep-linking cases understand that a link simply directs people to a certain location -- in the same way someone on a street corner can point you to a specific landmark or shop -- and should be protected free speech. "You have to remember what a link is," he said. "All a link is, is a scrap of text that's equivalent to a set of directions. It's really tantamount to telling someone how to get to a bookstore."
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