It’s easy to connect one online document to another by means of a hyperlink. But to hyperlink your documents to someone else’s without permission, not to mention failure to properly attribute your sources or give credit to the authors, is unethical and quite possibly illegal.

In 2008, GateHouse Media sued Boston.com, a subsidiary of The New York Times Co., for putting hyperlinks in its online documents directly to GateHouse articles and posting the headlines and first sentences of the articles on its own website. GateHouse claimed that The New York Times Co. was infringing on its copyrights and allowing users to bypass its homepage ads by means of this deep linking, or linking to a page on a website other than the homepage. A number of other legal cases have been filed concerning the legal acceptability of hyperlinking underlying content without owner permission.

The GateHouse case was settled before the courts had the opportunity to rule on the legal acceptability of hyperlinking. As of this writing in the United States, hyperlinking - including deep linking - is considered permissible under the “fair use” doctrine, which allows copyrighted works or portions thereof to be used for limited purpose without permission of its owners.

“Fair use” is generally determined based on the purpose and character of the user intent (commercial or non-profit), the nature of the work, the proportional amount of the work used in relation to the work as a whole, and the effect of the use of the work on its intended market or value.

However, in the United States, linking to content that is illegal or infringes against the intellectual property rights of others can be legally problematic. In other jurisdictions outside the United States, hyperlinking without permission and failure to attribute or properly credit the owners does constitute copyright infringement. And copyright infringement can result in huge damage awards against the infringers - both within and outside the United States.

As of this writing, the potential of infringing hyperlinks has not come up in the context of blogs. Simply stated, established news organizations have much deeper pockets than bloggers. Therefore, one can logically conclude that the financial and downstream moral effects of a copyright infringement award against a blogger can be potentially devastating, to the point of killing the blog. And that’s not all: infringers can also be enjoined against using the linked material and required to remove the links, in which case they would have been better off, financially and otherwise, scrapping the link in the first place.

The legal and ethical principles should be clear: Always get the permission of the owner of source material before using it in your blog; always correctly attribute that material or properly credit its creators; and always make sure that the material you’re linking to is infringement-free. If you don’t own it, linking to it is like helping yourself to someone else’s work without paying for it - and that’s stealing. Forearmed is forewarned and not everything goes…even online.