The World Wide Web has grown rapidly since it was introduced to us in the early 90's. In those days there wasn't much concern over issues like deep linking. Linking was seen as critical to the Internet. Most companies were happy to have others link to them because it brought new visitors and the possibility of new customers. Those times have changed, and the concern over deep linking has grown into a huge controversy over intellectual property rights, interference with advertising, and unfair competition. As developers of web content and as advisors to content developers, we found this topic of special interest.

What is deep linking?
Carl Kaplan defines Deep Linking as, "linking to a page deep within another web site," in his recent article, Legality of 'Deep Linking' Remains Deeply Complicated. Dave Winer of DaveNet calls it, "a publicly accessible HTML 'anchor' tag that points to an off-site web page that is not the home page of the site being pointed to."

Why deep link?
Deep Linking is used to offer links to important information that the author wants the user to have easy access to.

•  Educational Use
  • A student could be sent straight to the article  Recent decision about deep linking issued on March 27 instead of them having to waste time searching for the article from the home page.
•  Internal Company Use
  • A company could add a link that would send an employee straight to the purchasing page to give them easy access to contract information
•  Commercial Use
  • A company could use a deep link to get protected material for it's own profit as in the Ticketmaster vs Tickets.com case.