When the Internet was young, and the thrills of hypertext
linking were still new, hyperlinks were viewed as a potential
source of liability. I wrote about linking liability then, and
followed up a few years later, as more courts addressed
linking in various Internet situations. I concluded that linking is
generally low risk, and that conclusion still holds,
as we recently noted. If anyone were to write a treatise today
on Internet linking liabilities, it would be a thin volume.
Despite early fears of "linking," "framing,"
and "deep-linking" liabilities, few of those cases have
arisen, and none have fully succeeded. A highly publicized case in
which a law firm objected to links to its attorney biographical
pages, for example, was settled before the legal argument was
tested. And the Canadian Supreme Court in
Crooks v. Newton in 2011 rejected an explicit
liability-by-linking claim of a plaintiff who claimed that a
publisher should be liable for defamatory matter in
