If You Want Information to Stay in the Deep Web, Use Technology-Not Lawyers

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If You Want Information to Stay in the Deep Web, Use Technology-Not Lawyers

2/18/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Imagine our world in 2004 if everyone who published a Web site or transmitted an e-mail newsletter (like this one) with a hyperlink in it was legally required to obtain "permission in writing" from the owner of the page at the other end of the hyperlink. That might sound absurd to you, but it wasn't that long ago that there were movements to require such permission. There are still a few people out there who are outraged at the thought that others are linking to pages deep inside their Web sites without asking permission first.

The issue bubbles to our attention every couple of years and I think it's going to bubble up again later this year. Why? Because some companies are working hard to explore the Deep Web and bring to light information many of us think of as "hidden."

Trivia question: What do the Church of Scientology and Ticketmaster have in common? In the past they've each brought lawsuits to try to keep people from "deep linking" to parts of their Web sites. (They both lost, too.) As recently as two years ago, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals briefly ruled (and then took it back, thank goodness) that linking to a copyrighted photo on a Web site without permission violates the copyright owner's "public display" rights. Even one of my favorite entities in the world, National Public Radio, recently made a strong effort to assert that anyone linking to pages other than its front page needed to get its permission first. (It lost, too.)

These battles keep being fought because (a) some people don't "get it" and (b) because their lawyers can make money from them. And, believe it or not, some of their lawyers don't get it either.

Those battles keep being won by users (and lost by content providers) because the concept of "deep linking" is integral to the functioning of the World Wide Web. (That phrase, World Wide Web is starting to sound kind of quaint, isn't it?) Basically, it's kind of strange to put information in a publicly accessible place with a publicly available address and then expect that you can tell people not to share the address. If you extend the protection notion out a bit more, then why stop with Web publishing? The ultimate offenders of sharing public addresses of information are librarians and academics, with their extensive footnoting and production of bibliographies. Let's jail them all!

What's going to bring up the issue again soon are the ongoing efforts to bring up information from the "Deep Web." Most current search engines only index and serve up the "Surface Web" that consists mostly of static pages linked to each other by relatively unchanging hyperlinks. What used to be called the "Invisible Web" (but Deep Web is a better phrase because the stuff is not invisible, it's just deeper in the Web) includes a lot of stuff that search engines don't find easily - like graphic images, or Word and Excel documents, and especially information that is available through the Web but is hosted in databases that we think require human brains to exploit.

Already, lots of things on the Web that were "invisible" via search engines a few years ago are findable now.