Dallas Morning News Admits SLAPP Time vs. Barking Dogs . . . .

[tom poe]

Hi: Nice work, Nader:

http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z5DD60BD

A letter from the non-profit public advocacy group was sent today to 
Dallas-based Belo, which recently demanded that BarkingDogs.org, a local news 
Web site, stop deep linking to stories within The Dallas Morning News site, 
DallasNews.com. Instead, BarkingDogs should only link to the DallasNews home 
page, Belo's lawyers said in a cease-and-desist letter sent last month to 
self-proclaimed Net activist Avi S. Adelman, who publishes BarkingDogs.

In a letter to Belo attorney J. Kevin Gray, Public Citizen attorney Paul Alan 
Levy disputed Belo's contention that deep linking without permission violates 
the newspaper's copyrights. Levy pointed to several court decisions which 
rejected the argument that deep links are copyright infringements.

"[Belo's] contention that the provision of hyperlinks to locations within 
Belo's publicly available Web site violates the copyright laws unless 
permission is given for such links threatens the viability of the World Wide 
Web itself," Levy wrote. "Indeed, review of various Web sites operated by the 
Belo Corp. reveals that deep linking is a practice in which your own client 
is engaged."

As IWantMedia.com reported last week, Belo's Providence (R.I.) Journal 
publishes a technology blog that deep links to other Web sites. 
(http://www.projo.com/technology/netrunner/)