In February 1999, the case was settled out of court in a non-disclosure agreement that led to Microsoft no longer having deep links to Ticketmaster.
In March 2000, ruling on Tickets.com's motion to dismiss U.S. District Judge Harry Lindley Hupp found that deep linking was not prohibited by the Copyright Act because no direct copying had occurred.
Websites usually do not object to surface linking because it contributes to a growth in traffic and popularity, which leads to a monetary gain for advertising.
[6] After the talks reached a stalemate and without permission from Ticketmaster,[6] Microsoft used the deep links on its Sidewalk.com website,[6] a Seattle city guide that provided details about future events in the area.
[9][10] The lawsuit, Ashley Dunn wrote in The New York Times, "sent a shiver of anxiety through the online world since it struck at one of the most basic aspects of the Web – the freedom and openness of the hypertext link".
[17] Tickets.com employed a web crawler to systematically comb Ticketmaster's webpages and retrieve event details and uniform resource locators (URLs).
The lawsuit, scholars Teresa Scassa and Michael Eugene Deturbide wrote, were motivated by how Ticket.com was becoming the "choice portal" for consumers buying tickets on the web by taking advantage of Ticketmaster's content.
[22] It also said that Tickets.com violated the website's terms and conditions, which disallowed users from using Ticketmaster for monetary gain or unsanctioned deep linking.
[27] The judge further ruled that Tickets.com was not legally obligated to abide by Ticketmaster's terms and conditions because they were not "open and obvious and in fact hard to miss".
[32] Basing his reasoning on Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp., Hupp wrote that Ticket.com's short-lived copies of Ticketmaster's webpages, which were used to obtain facts, was legal under the fair use doctrine of United States copyright law.
[19] It passed legal muster under Sony Computer Entertainment because it was immediately removed after having served its purpose to retrieve non-copyrightable facts and was the ablest, albeit not sole, method to do so.
In their 2012 book Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped, Dean Budnick and Josh Baron reported that "the court refused to grant a preliminary injunction on the copyright issue, and although the lawsuit lingered for a few years, Ticketmaster never received a definitive judicial pronouncement in its favor".
[34] In a one-paragraph unpublished opinion, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld Hupp's decision.
[35] Approving of the ruling, Tickets.com's lawyer Danniel Harris said, "It is significant, not so much for the dismissals, but in the time and care put into the underlying issues".
Clearly, Judge Hupp leaves open the possibility for a claim of copyright infringement and unfair competition in cases where the user could be confused as to the source of content or be oblivious to the fact that he had been linked into the interior of another site.
[39]The New York Times's Carl S. Kaplan agreed with Kubiszyn, quoting Jessica R. Friedman, who said that "the law on linking is still in a gray area".