By his own proud admission, Avi Adelman is an irrepressible muckraker.
As the proprietor of BarkingDogs.org, a "proactive" news website that unearths political malfeasance in and around Dallas, Texas, Adelman has been, as he loves to say, "a thorn in the side of a lot of people out here."
And for all his digging, he has faced more than a few scrapes. Once, the city actually tried to shut down his site. They failed.
Now Adelman is locked in a battle against the Belo media corporation, owner of The Dallas Morning News, which sent him a legalistic letter this week demanding that BarkingDogs.org remove all "deep links" to the DallasNews.com site.
"Deep links" point to specific content within a site, allowing readers to bypass the site's front page. Instead of linking to a specific article within The Dallas Morning News's site, Belo wants Adelman to only link to the site's main page.
"As you may know, the Belo content (various news articles) is protected by copyright laws of the United States," the company's legal letter states. "Accordingly, we must request that you cease and desist from any unauthorized use of the Belo content, including without limitation, allowing users of BarkingDogs.org to deep link directly to the Belo content or from posting, without prior written permission, any other Belo content on BarkingDogs.org.
"Any proper links to the Belo content should be directly hyperlinked to The Dallas Morning News homepage located at www.dallasnews.com."
The letter specifically referenced an article Adelman had written on Feb. 14, 2002, which pointed to two Morning News articles.
Belo says that those links "can result in a viewer not understanding that the content is on our client's site" and, more importantly, "allows the viewer to avoid the advertising, etc., on the homepage (which places our client in a bad position with respect to its advertisers, etc.)."
As a point of contention between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of the public, "deep linking" seemed to go away for the past two years, after a federal judge declared it kosher.
"Hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act," U.S. District Judge Harry Hupp said in that ruling, which pitted Tickets.com against Ticketmaster. "There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library's card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently."
But the issue seems to have been resurrected, much to the chagrin of many small-time Web publishers. The Danish Newspaper Publishers' Association recently asked a Danish court to ban Newsbooster, a site that links to news articles, from deep linking to Danish newspaper stories.
That case is pending, and it's not clear what effect a ruling would have on sites outside Denmark. But what is clear, said Scott Baradell, a spokesman for Belo, is that "the law around deep linking is still evolving," and that the Ticketmaster case doesn't necessarily preclude his company from asking webmasters to stop deep linking.
Baradell declined to answer specific questions about the BarkingDogs.org case, saying that the company's policy is to not comment on legal matters.
But he said that Belo's position is "ultimately that this is our content and we should have some control about where and in what way it is used. We'll see what happens in the law and in the courts to decide how to proceed."
Another spokesman for the company noted that in its terms of service, the Dallas Morning News site states that "If you operate a website and wish to link to this site, you may link only to the home page of the site and not to any other page or subdomain of us."
But the particular irony of that requirement, leaving aside its legality, does not escape Avi Adelman. The Dallas Morning News, like any newspaper, would seem to want to be associated with the free flow of information and would therefore want unimpeded access to its articles -- right?
"There is an issue with information dissemination here," Adelman said. "As one of my friends said, 'You're making it easier for us because the site's so confusing.'"
But Belo's spokesman didn't think there was anything wrong with a newspaper trying to keep down deep links. "One of the ongoing issues with Web content is that it's free, and how do you make money off that? That's always the question," Baradell said. In other words, even a newspaper has to make money.
That's of course a fair point; but in the age of Google and news blogs, an age in which people increasingly come upon their news by skipping from one deep link to another instead of going to newspapers' home pages, might it not be counterproductive to stop people from deep linking?
Baradell explained that "how we proceed is very much case by case," and he declined to discuss how Belo decides which deep links to go after and which to let alone. It's unclear whether the company would send letters to, say, Google or The Drudge Report, sites that can steer a lot of traffic to a specific deep link.
But to be on the safe side, the company's lawyer advises that "while we encourage links to the Dallas Morning News site, we must request that they all go to the homepage of the site, and not directly to any interior content. If needed, you can provide with your link info on how to find the specific article of interest once they are on the homepage. We trust that this clarifies our position."
Adelman, though, says that he will not stop deep linking to DallasNews.com content, nor will he take down old deep links.
"People keep telling me that what they're doing, this doesn't make a damn bit of sense," he said. "And what have I got to lose? What are they going to take from me? My kids?"
