This intellectual property issue is a product of the increasingly sophisticated systems which help users browse the World Wide Web. To the recent initiate, the amount of information now available on the Internet is mind-boggling. Anyone with a computer linked to the Net can quickly look up hundreds of items on any given topic from newspapers, academic journals, businesses and special interest groups. Search-engine software allows users to navigate this vast sea of information by typing a few key words to bring up hundreds of sites on a desired topic. Search engines use several indexing tools to find information, including hyperlinks, meta-links, deep links and frames.
Hyperlinks are words within an article printed in blue and underlined.
Clicking the computer's mouse on these underlined words causes an article, document or even an entirely different Website on the underlined topic to appear on the screen. For example, if the title of a recent court decision is underlined in blue in a law review article about the case, a click of the mouse on the case name will bring the full court decision up on the user's screen. Another type of link is the invisible meta-link. These are indexing words imbedded at the top of an article that search engines read to locate documents matching a user's request. Not surprisingly, the invisibility of meta-links has led to misuse.