Computers-salkowski/19/dp1st/mark2nd
Joe Salkowski
I’d like a house right on the beach but no sand, please.
Then again, maybe I’d rather live in Phoenix without the summer heat. Or in Alaska, perhaps, in a nice neighborhood where it never snows.
Sounds a little unrealistic, right? If you want to call these places home, there’s no getting around things that come with the territory.
The same is true online. Sure, the weather’s always room temperature. But anyone who wants to build a home on the Web is just going to have to deal with the medium’s virtual realities.
This is a lesson Ticketmaster seems unwilling to learn. For the second time in three years, the ticket-selling giant has filed a lawsuit against a company that had the nerve to post a link to its site. That’s right: They’re complaining that another site Tickets.com, in this case is sending them customers.
The lawsuit also accuses Tickets.com of stealing information and misleading potential customers into believing certain Ticketmaster-run events were sold out. But while that fight involves just those two sites, Ticketmaster’s campaign against free linking amounts to a misguided claim against the Web itself.
Tickets.com aspires to be an online clearinghouse for ticket sales. But since Ticketmaster holds the exclusive right to sell tickets to most of the world’s ticket-worthy events, Tickets.com often offers its visitors links to the pages deep inside Ticketmaster’s Web site where those tickets are sold.
Ticketmaster, though, wants its customers to pass through several introductory pages that feature ads from the site’s sponsors. Indeed, the company has convinced Yahoo and other sites to pay for the privilege of linking visitors directly to its interior pages. Since Tickets.com isn’t paying, Ticketmaster claims these so-called “deep links” are an unfair business practice and violate its Web site’s terms of use.
Earlier this year, the company settled a similar lawsuit it filed against Microsoft in April 1997 for deep links posted at the software company’s Sidewalk-brand city guide sites. As a result, courts haven’t had a chance to settle the question of whether Webmasters need a license to link to certain pages.
Most Web users would reject that notion as nonsense. Links serve as the basic infrastructure of the Web, carrying people to specific pages by way of an online street address. Seen this way, Ticketmaster is claiming the right to collect a toll on the public streets that lead to its store.
It’s hard to see how sending potential customers directly to a competitor’s cash register can be considered an unfair business practice. If Tickets.com can make money that way, I don’t think there’s a law in the books that can stop them.
Ticketmaster claims the links falsely imply some partnership between the two sites, but that’s a stretch. While a small fraction of the Web’s links are sponsored, the vast majority are posted for free by people who thought they might be useful. Everyone knows what links mean online. Everyone, that is, except Ticketmaster.
The First Amendment and fair-use exceptions to copyright law prevent any company from claiming total dominion over its name or Web address. I can say “http://www.ticketmaster.com” whenever I want, though it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
I can also say “Ticketmaster sucks,” which probably sounds familiar to performers and fans who’ve grown frustrated with the company’s near monopoly over ticket sales. And anyone can say either of those things on a Web page, where they enjoy as much constitutional protection as anything printed on paper.
Ticketmaster could always reject direct links to its innermost Web pages by forcing visitors to log into its site with a name and password. It also could reject customers who click over from Tickets.com (it tried this for a while) or throw advertisements in their faces when they arrive.
The company chose instead to file a lawsuit, hoping to convince some federal judge that linking should be a pay-per-view event. But nobody ever said the Web was supposed to accommodate any one company’s business model. Ticketmaster should be forced to adapt to the Net, not the other way around.
If Ticketmaster doesn’t like the way the Web works, it should take down its site and go home. Of course, that would mean watching Tickets.com and other online competitors chip away at its market domination.
In that case, Ticketmaster could start selling tickets to an event that might well prove popular with music fans: its funeral.
To contact syndicated columnist Joe Salkowski, you can e-mail him at [email protected] or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.
