Online news sites are turning to a novel way to make some extra cash: requiring fees for links.

The Albuquerque Journal charges $50 for the right to link to each of its articles. Localbusiness.com and Latino.com are more generous, and permit one to five links without payment. There's just one catch. Legal experts say no U.S. law or court decision allows a website to successfully demand payment for links to its content. Such linking is a common practice online and allows services like search engines to exist. The sites that limit unapproved linking rely on a service provided by Renton, Washington, startup iCopyright.com. In exchange for a portion of the licensing revenues, customarily less than 50 percent, icopyright.com handles collecting payment for article reprints, photocopy licenses or links. Nobody questions a publisher's legal right to demand payments for article reprints, at least for substantial quantities. But iCopyright's license agreement, which is featured at the bottom of articles at its partners' sites, says the company can selectively grant or withhold "HTML Link permission (that) allows you to link to a specified Web page." The iCopyright.com license agreement also restricts what can be said about the content of the linked-to article. If you sign up to pay $50 to link to, say, an Albuquerque Journal article, you agree not to say anything "derogatory" about "the author, the publication from which the content came, or any person connected with the creation of the content or depicted in the content."