We’ve written before about a guy named Robert Davis who was sued in a Texas Court for using deep links on his website. He lost the case at the trial court level and now an appellate court has ruled against him too.

SuperCrossLive.com appealed the decision by the Texas court but the appeal was denied on January the 18th. On January the 30th SuperCrossLive.com appealed to the 5th Circuit Court which can overturn the original verdict.

This case is of course far from over and the ruling itself has been heavily criticized as it is considered to undermine the functioning of the web as a whole. The judge has been accused of misunderstanding the technology involved.

If deep linking does become illegal, this could have huge consequences for the internet. Search engines would essentially be out of business unless they obtained specific permission from each site. Blogs would essentially be illegal too.

Davis is carrying out this fight all by himself, i.e., he has no attorney and is spending his own money. As John ponders in his PC Magazine column, why isn’t the community helping him if so much is at stake?!

You have to wonder exactly how dumb the executives at Google, Yahoo!, and even Microsoft are when a case waltzes through a court in Texas that not only directly affects their respective businesses but has the potential to bankrupt at least two of these companies.



  1. Lauren the Ghoti says:

    Damn HTML tags. Maybe I’ll get it right yet…

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation

  2. kballweg says:

    Sorry folks. T&A and OS wars take precendent over substance. Dvork-dot-org-slash-blog is about yellow journalism, and clicks. Only two comments so far, and this is about something that makes the internet work.

    Puts some tits on it SN.

  3. Greg Allen says:

    Excuse my ignorance… what’s the difference between “deep linking” and regular linking?

  4. Mr. Fusion says:

    In the previous discussion the sides were well aired. This decision will NOT hurt the internet and could quite possibly strengthen it.

    SFX made money from selling ads that viewers to a copyrighted performance could see. Davis linked directly to this copyrighted material bypassing the ads. SFX did not gain any money from this and lost potential ad revenue. The other insult is that SFX used their servers and bandwidth that Davis took without permission.

    The fact that SFX didn’t use any counter measures is irrelevant. If someone was using John C. Dvorak’s name and image to enrich them self be acceptable because JD didn’t keep a bag over his head?

    If people can not recoup their costs, there will be no free internet. Unfortunately, that is the way it is.

  5. Sounds The Alarm says:

    Can we all just agree to allow Texas to leave the union and start its own little Iran?

  6. Mike Voice says:

    7 Thats all weird seeing as there is already case law on this..

    Hahahahaha

    ahem, sorry…

    As if a Texas judge has to be concerned with what those liberal fruitcakes out in California think…

    Heck, its been less than 3-years since Texas’ sodomy law was ruled unconstitutional… 😉

    http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/26/scotus.sodomy/

  7. natefrog says:

    #8: I second that motion, and move that we also remove the original Confederate States of America along with Texas. . .

  8. James Hill says:

    When the Internet dies, maybe we can all go back to playing NWN on AOL.


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