Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc.

''Ticketmaster Corp., et al. v. Tickets.Com, Inc.'' was a 2000 case by the United States District Court for the Central District of California finding that deep linking did not violate the Copyright Act of 1976 because it did not involve direct copying. The decision permitted Tickets.com to place deep links to Ticketmaster.

Deep linking, hyperlinking to another website's interior pages, was the subject of considerable controversy in the late 1990s and early 2000s because it allowed consumers to bypass a website's advertising-rich homepage. This could lead to significant financial losses in advertising revenue based on page impressions. In early 1997, Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for unauthorized deep linking to Ticketmaster in its Sidewalk.com website. In February 1999, the case was settled out of court in a non-disclosure agreement that led to Microsoft no longer having deep links to Ticketmaster. In July 1999, Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit against Tickets.com with ten causes of action, including charges that Tickets.com had violated federal copyright laws and violated Ticketmaster's terms and conditions.

In March 2000, ruling on Tickets.com's motion to dismiss U.S. District Judge Harry Lindley Hupp found that deep linking was not prohibited by the Copyright Act because no direct copying had occurred. In August 2000, Hupp denied Ticketmaster's motion for a preliminary injunction against Tickets.com's linking and web crawling. For linking, he wrote that uniform resource locators (URLs) were not copyrightable because they contained only factual and function features, and for web crawling, he wrote that it passed legal muster under the fair use doctrine and did not pose an undue burden on Ticketmaster's servers. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed in a one-paragraph unpublished opinion.

Context

There are two forms of linking: surface linking (which delivers the consumer to the linked website's homepage) and deep linking (which delivers the consumer to a non-homepage link of the website). Websites usually do not object to surface linking because it contributes to a growth in traffic and popularity, which leads to a monetary gain for advertising. Deep linking, on the other hand, has been a magnet for debate because it circumvents the advertising-rich homepage and may lead to lost revenue.

''Ticketmaster v. Microsoft''

Ticketmaster and Microsoft attempted to forge an agreement to allow Microsoft to have deep links to Ticketmaster. After the talks reached a stalemate and without permission from Ticketmaster, Microsoft used the deep links on its Sidewalk.com website, a Seattle city guide that provided details about future events in the area. Ticketmaster responded by banning incoming requests from the Microsoft links, and Microsoft countered the block by providing links to search engine queries that linked to Ticketmaster pages.

In early 1997, Ticketmaster sued Microsoft because its Sidewalk.com website was linking to pages on Ticketmaster about particular events. The lawsuit, Ashley Dunn wrote in ''The New York Times'', "sent a shiver of anxiety through the online world since it struck at one of the most basic aspects of the Web – the freedom and openness of the hypertext link". Calling Microsoft's deep linking "electronic piracy", Ticketmaster argued that the practice circumvented Ticketmaster's homepage, which had paid advertisements, and led to fewer homepage visits. This could negatively impact Ticketmaster's page impressions-based advertising income. Ticketmaster further asserted that it had contracts permitting other websites to deep link to Ticketmaster; Microsoft's unauthorized deep linking therefore rendered the contracts effectively valueless. In February 1999, Ticketmaster settled the deep linking lawsuit against Microsoft after Microsoft complied with the request to cease the linking. The details of the settlement were subjected to a non-disclosure agreement. After their settlement, Yahoo! and Knight-Ridder signed contracts with Ticketmaster and were given leave to make deep links to Ticketmaster. ''The New York Times''s Bob Tedeschi noted in August 1997 that the Ticketmaster–Microsoft deep-linking case was "closely watched by legal experts because no court has yet ruled on whether deep linking is legal".

Background

The legality of deep linking was the center of a fractious dispute among electronic commerce businesses. To compete for customers' consideration, a number of websites included hyperlinks to their competitors' pages, bringing users to inner pages of their opponents' websites. This practice circumvents the opponents' home page, which contains money-generating advertisements. In 2000, Ticketmaster had signed numerous "exclusive arguments" with a large number of the major athletic and amusement organizations. The ticket business began shifting to the internet, leading to competition between Ticketmaster and Tickets.com. Tickets.com allowed consumers to purchase tickets at their website. They had links to ticket-selling websites like Ticketmaster and Ticketweb to allow consumers to purchase tickets not sold on Tickets.com. Tickets.com included the statement "These tickets are sold by another ticketing company" before each link to a different ticket-selling website. Whereas Tickets.com generates revenue through web advertisements, Ticketmaster received money through Internet ticket selling and advertisements founded upon how many visitors accessed its homepage. Tickets.com employed a web crawler to systematically comb Ticketmaster's webpages and retrieve event details and uniform resource locators (URLs). After obtaining the facts, the web crawlers would destroy in 15 seconds the webpage copies but retain the URLs. The lawsuit, scholars Teresa Scassa and Michael Eugene Deturbide wrote, were motivated by how Ticket.com was becoming the "choice portal" for consumers buying tickets on the web by taking advantage of Ticketmaster's content.

Legal proceedings

On July 23, 1999, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch, a subsidiary of Pasadena-based Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against Tickets.com in an attempt to block Tickets.com from disapproved deep linking to Ticketmaster, asserting that the practice caused them monetary losses on their homepage advertising. In the lawsuit, Ticketmaster alleged that Tickets.com had engaged in unlawful business choices. The litany of ten causes of action included charges that Tickets.com had breached federal copyright laws and engaged in false advertising, tortious interference, reverse passing off, unfair competition