In fact, companies like the House of Blues are resurrecting centuries-old torts to accommodate these new concepts. Even if the use was for a short amount of time and didn't cause any lasting injury, trespass to chattels recognized that there may be damages flowing from this unauthorized use. It's just about permission. At the heart of these cases, someone has simply linked to a file without permission. Spiders from search engines comb the Web every day looking for new content to index.
Users click on search engine results and are transported straight to the content they want.
House of Blues would say the difference is that the Streambox spiders ignore the robots.txt file. According to the complaint, House of Blues has clearly indicated in its robots.txt file what should be indexed and what shouldn't. In the robots.txt file, the URLs of the streams are off-limits. But the real equitable difference between search engine results and streamlinking is that the costs involved are different. At a time when most content companies are failing, I'm sympathetic to the mechanisms companies are using to build revenue.