Until recently, web site owners largely welcomed the practice of linking. However, as competition for advertising dollars stiffens, more and more companies are likely to seek legal redress when they can make a tenable claim that other sites are diverting advertising dollars away from them. (Maureen O'Rourke, Fencing Cyberspace: Drawing Borders in a Virtual World, 82 Minn. L. Rev. 609, 639 (1998).) Disputes over trademarks are likely only to increase because establishing a brand identity is one way to attract users to one's site and thereby generate more advertising dollars. (Id.) The task for the law in assessing these claims is to weigh competing policies to determine when intellectual property rights should be implicated on the Internet. Simply stated, the ability to link has value, but in the wide-open world of the Internet, it has been difficult to appropriate that value, creating problems for commercial Web sites that want to use their content as an asset when striking deals with other sites. (Id.)

Web site owners who are concerned about unwanted linking do not have to depend solely on their legal rights to prevent it. Problems with linking can be addressed by one or more technological devices. Web site owners may build technological fences or otherwise adjust their content to deal with unwanted linking. (Id. at 649.) Perhaps the easiest way to protect a site is by requiring the user to enter a unique password to gain access. Another technological solution is for the site owner periodically to change the page's URL manually, thus destroying the effectiveness of any links to the former URL. (Id. at 645.) A more complex approach is that of dynamic paging, in which the reference point changes, giving linkers no fixed site at which to highlight. (Id.) There are, also, mechanisms that enable a site to prevent linking by some sites but not others. The programmer can write the web page's HTML code to recognize links from the undesired site and refuse to process them. (Id. at 646.)

The issue of links deep within the site is more problematic. Such interior links bypass the introductory information and ads contained on the home page and present the site's content out of context. (Id.) There exists, though, a technological mechanism to prevent linking to interior pages, thus preventing linkers from bypassing the ads on the home page. A site can also block spiders from indexing the site in the spider's database. So while technology presents problems for legal protection of intellectual property rights, technology also presents solutions for protecting those rights.