MP3 audio files happen to be at the center of current disputes because their short playing length, imposed either by studio executive fiat or poverty of musical thought, makes them the popular medium most appropriate for storage and transfer with today's disk space and bandwidth. Both sites found it hard to fight the argument that they were engaging in copyright infringement. Both sites came out losers in initial rulings and scrambled to strike deals with their accusers. It is important, though, to return to the millennial claim. The Web has made its fortune on hyperlinks.
Content creators see a hyperlink as a reference, bringing no onus on the person making the link.
But instead, too many waited for the event to occur and then reacted with a hysterical sense of entitlement. For many reasons, several commercial sites have tried to prevent others from linking to their pages. A minor irritant for eBay may have been the ability of customers to look at auctions without seeing the ads on the main eBay page. Since advertising is a major source of income for commercial Web sites, many of their owners react violently when someone else links to their material. All were settled with an acknowledgment that the site making links required permission from the site providing the material.