Hypertext linking
Hypertext linking is the method by which you can click on an underlined word and be taken to another internet site. There are a number of different ways of linking.
General linking is where it is obvious that the linked document is entirely separate from the linking document. General linking can subdivide into surface linking where the user is taken to the homepage of the website and deep linking is where the user is taken to a link deep in the home of the webpage. This latter type of linking may cause financial loss to the website since visitors to the site can bypass any advertising contained on the front page. Advertisers may then of course re-negotiate the terms of the advertising contract or indeed decide to pull out of advertising on that page completely. The Scottish case of Shetland Times Ltd v Dr. Jonathan Wills and Another  involved the use of hypertext linking. The Shetland News took a selection of headl英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】ines from the front page of the Shetland Times’ web page and used them as hyper-text links to the stories in the Shetland Times. Therefore by browsing the Shetland News’ page the accessor could make simple links to the times’ stories, read them and back space to the News’ web page. The Times sought an interim interdict – the Scottish equivalent of the English interim injunction. The case was settled out of court. The first legal decision to decide that a hypertext link, per se, could be an infringement of IP law was the Dutch case of Church of Spiritual Technology v. Dataweb.  Compare this case with the US case of Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com. 
In the Stepstone case of January 17 2001 an injunction was obtained by Stepstone against deep links to its recruitment site by another on-line recruiter OfiR, on the basis that the linking was an infringement of the database regulations.  In America there have recently been cases to injunct the use of automated search agents to collect information from other sites, for example prices or items being auctioned by E-bay.com for comparison purposes. See also the case of Ticket Master Corp. v. Microsoft Corp. 
Frame linking is where the link to another website is contained within a frame that obscures the identity of the website since the URL in the address bar does not change, even though the viewer is looking at a new website. There has been no significant decision on the legality of this, although the issues we 本文来自：英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】