Warp wrote:
>   The funny thing is that deep-linking cannot be legally prohibited. 

There was actually a lawsuit in the USA over this, with someone deep-linking 
to Ticketmaster's concert sale pages without going thru the top page. The 
judge decided that since the concert information was "fact", having the 
program scrape that information wasn't copyright violation, in part because 
the program held onto the scraped page only long enough to extract the 
factual information.  Plus, in presenting the link into ticketmaster, the 
originating site made it clear it was a link to an external site and didn't 
try to look like part of ticketmaster, so there was no trademark or 
copyright problem with that.

That's one of the few bits that actually *have* set a precedent here.

>   In Finland in particular, it has been *officially* and *explicitly* stated
> that deep-linking is legal and prohibiting it has no legal basis. Yet there
> are tons of Finnish company websites out there with the prohibition in their
> license agreement.

But if you agree not to do it, you're violating other laws, like breach of 
content. (Assuming that the click-through license agreement can be enforced.)

That's another of those funky copyright questions: Who is doing the 
"copying" if it's all 100% automated. If I post something to a newsgroup and 
it gets distributed and google news picks it up and then you look at it, who 
made "the copy"?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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