Can I use a URL in my work without permission?

[quincy]

Didn't Ticketmaster *not* get the injunction against Tickets.com deep linking?

I know you're not claiming it did, but, when used as a warning against the possibility of defending a lawsuit for some act someone once thought was a violation of IP, shouldn't there be some guidance? It seems the passing off of another's work as your own is a problem as is a violation of terms of use.

See also:
http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=Intellectual_Freedom_Issues&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=25306
http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/linking-copyrighted-materials

Right. In the Ticketmasters case against Tickets.com there was no injunction issued.

That is not to say, however, that a suit cannot be filed against a deep-linker and, perhaps, even won by the plaintiff. The Ticketmaster suit was just one of first of its kind to be filed. In one suit out of Denmark a couple years after the Ticketmaster action, for instance, a court stopped the "copyright infringing" linking by a website to a newspaper site.

IP rights have been, and continue to be, asserted against deep linkers by various websites (including the National Public Radio website). A suit is more likely to arise if a deep linker has affected the advertising revenue of a website.

Even though most courts are ruling that linking and deep linking by themselves are not an infringement on copyrights, there can be other claims besides copyright infringement that could potentially fly and, of course, even if a copyright infringement claim is filed by a plaintiff and lost, settled or dismissed, the costs for a defendant to get to that point can be extremely high.

That is perhaps the best reason why, when using another's copyrighted material in any way, it is always legally safest, and can be financially wisest, to get permission from the copyright holder first. It is often, as Silverplum has noted, not all that difficult to obtain permission for legitimate uses.