USA Networks' Ticketmaster and Microsoft have settled their 2-year-old lawsuit over how MSN's Sidewalk city guides link to the ticket vendor's site.
"They settled on mutually agreeable terms," said Microsoft corporate spokesman Tom Pilla. Further details were not released, but Sidewalk no longer links deep within Ticketmaster Online. Instead, surfers are pointed to the site's home page, where they must find their events on their own.
A Microsoft executive told The New York Times Monday that an unannounced 22 January settlement prohibits Microsoft's Sidewalk guides from linking deep into the ticket seller's site.
The Ticketmaster-Microsoft squabble arose in early 1997, after Ticketmaster formed an interactive alliance with the Sidewalk rival CitySearch to provide ticketing and event information and services.
Ticketmaster has since merged its online operations with CitySearch to form Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch, a company that went public in December. A company spokeswoman could not be reached for comment.
Ticketmaster objected to the Sidewalk links as "cherry-picking" on its content. Though Ticketmaster said at the time that the suit was unrelated to its CitySearch deal, the Microsoft links could clearly be seen as devaluing the content that Ticketmaster was providing to CitySearch.
Microsoft contended that the open nature of the Internet -- and the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech -- allowed it to link to any site it wished, and said Ticketmaster ought to be happy that it was sending business its way.
