Thanks to all who replied to my question. What I have found out is, there has been a case ruled on by U.S. District Court Judge in California. A snipit from
Question: Is "deep linking" illegal?
Answer: "Deep linking" refers to the creation of hyperlinks to a page other than a website's homepage. For example, instead of pointing a link at
Some website owners complain that deep links "steal" traffic to their homepages or disrupt the intended flow of their websites. In particular, Ticketmaster has argued that other sites should not be permitted to send browsers directly to Ticketmaster event listings. Ticketmaster settled its claim against Microsoft and lost a suit against Tickets.com over deep linking.
From Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com opinion: Further, hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act (whatever it may do for other claims) since no copying is involved. The customer is automatically transferred to the particular genuine web page of the original author. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library's card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.
So far, courts have found that deep links to web pages were neither a copyright infringement nor a trespass.
So, I guess we're OK.
Just to reply to a couple of the post. I have, and will continue to remove any link that the web site owner request. This is done without any hesitation. My site has frames, so I have the links set up to open in a "new" window so there will be no mistake what site you are on. There are no files of any kind "hot-linked". Any thing downloaded from one of the sites is from them, not me.
Again, thanks for all the replies. As usual, this group can be counted on for help. Oh yeah, I did put my URL back into my signature.
Jake Jarvis