Imagine living in a world where you couldn’t freely link to certain websites, news articles, blogs, etc. I know this may sound a little far-fetched because, after all, anyone can link to whomever they want – right? Wrong. In a recent article, I was surprised to hear that a company’s right to link had been stifled.

On the slate.com website, there was an article that talked about a recent ruling in a case between Blockshopper, a real estate news site and New Jones Day, a large (2,300 lawyers) law firm. New Jones Day sued Blockshopper for linking to bio pages of a couple of their lawyers in news stories posted on the Blockshopper website related to properties that these lawyers had purchased. The New Jones Day law firm was very angry and demanded that Blockshopper remove these items. When Blockshopper refused, the firm sued this small, 15-staff startup for trademark infringement. New Jones Day’s legal theory was that the link on the Blockshopper website could cause people to think that New Jones Day was associated with this real estate news site. However, when we dig deeper into what trademark infringement actually is, it is when consumer confusion is caused. Working off of that definition, neither one of the links to the New Jones Day website causes consumer confusion. As a matter of fact, the links are actually relevant to the real estate news presented and the Blockshopper website.

So you probably wonder what the outcome was. Well, unfortunately, Blockshopper lost. The judge, obviously someone who doesn’t fully understand how this whole “internet linking” thing works, ruled in favor of the plaintiff (New Jones Day Law firm). This lead to a settlement in which Blockshopper is required to change the way they create links to the New Jones Day website. The founder of Blockshopper decided to go ahead and settle as opposed to the possibility of having to continue to pay huge amounts of money to continue to fight this. Blockshopper agreed to not use the names of actual attorneys within the anchor text of a link but to only use the full URL of the law firm.

Unbelievable! Who would have thought something like this could happen? Understandably, Blockshopper didn’t continue to fight this as they are a small, start-up business. Perhaps a larger company would have pursued this more. Or, maybe, if this case was presented in front of a different judge the ruling would have been different. However, the ruling that actually occurred sends the horrible message that companies can force websites to revise their linking styles by alleging copyright infringement. That’s scary. What’s even more disturbing is that in this case, the law firm is shooting themselves in the foot. Who doesn’t appreciate free link love? I guess New Jones Day didn’t and if I were Blockshopper, I would surely stop giving it to them.