Another possible copyright infringement issue that aggregators face in the
United States concerns deep-linking. Although U.S. publishers have not made
claim against news aggregators specifically concerning deep-linkingpublishers around the world have made the claim.280 Deep-linking has been
discussed only in a handful of cases in the United States, including
Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.Com, Inc.281 If Tickets.com did not sell tickets to
a certain event, the website provided deep-links to the relevant ticketing web
pages within the Ticketmaster website, which bypassed Ticketmaster’s
homepage.282 Ticketmaster brought a charge of copyright infringement against
Tickets.com claiming Tickets.com’s deep-linking practice copied and extracted
basic information from Ticketmaster’s interior web pages.283 The district court
rejected the claim of copyright infringement because Tickets.com presented
Ticketmaster’s factual data in its own format.284 Furthermore, the court ruled
the deep-linking was not a violation of the Copyright Act because customers
were automatically transferred to a subsidiary webpage of another site.285 In
addition, the court found no copyright to subside in the URL because it is
simply an address, “open to the public, like the street address of a building,
which, if known, can enable the user to reach the building.”286