Way back in the day, if I remember correctly, Runnersworld threatened to sue us because we linked to a page of theirs that didn't have. People under the age of 30 are going to have a hard time believing this but at the time some weren't sure if it was a copyright violation if you linked to someone else's page.
We've always felt at Letsrun that's one of our strengths. If you go to any other website, they generally only link to their own stuff. We link to what's best.
They used to have like a bunch of stories each day under the same URL. If you wanted to link to the third one, the only way to do it was to click on the "print page" button and it gave you a differnt URL. The problem - according to them - was that page didn't have ads on it and they said they were going to sue.
We showed no fear and published the letter from their lawyer. Not only that, we sent them a cheeky reply and threatened to countersue them as a quick search of their messageboard showed it contained tons of our material.
Read this and you'll get a quick primer:
It became like a huge think on the Internet as we had all sorts of Internet pioneers and free speech people offering to represent us as the concept of "deep-linking" wasn't quite established yet.