The Dallas Morning News recently told Barking Dogs, a gadfly Dallas neighborhood organization often critical of the paper, to stop "deep linking" to DMN stories. That's right -- Belo, the parent company of the DMN, sent a Cease and Desist letter to Barking Dogs demanding that they link only to the DMN's homepage, saying anything else was losing advertising revenue. Barking Dogs has not very gracefully declined to comply.

Public Citizen is a little rabid in its defense, saying that banning deep linking would destroy the Internet. That's true, but there's a much easier way to look at it. A deep link is like the phone number of an employee in a large corporation. If someone publishes that phone number, you have a right to print it, or to call it. The company has the right to change the number or not to answer it.

If the DMN doesn't like deep linking, it can use WebObjects or some other unfriendly technology that frustrates static links for individual pages. If the site chooses to give its pages links that always point to that content, then just like a corporate phone number, you're free to use them however you want. You're also free not to link to the paper at all, as this item does not.