Another Publisher Challenges Legality of Links 288
NewtonsLaw writes: "It seems that the legality of hypertext linkiing has once a gain been called into question according to
this story running on Wired.com.
As the former online publisher of 7am.com, I was once threatened by the Nando Times in a similar manner when I was linking to their stories.
Local TV broadcaster TVNZ also made all sorts of noise about the illegality of linking to their content
back in 1966 but have since come to their senses.
Over the years I've had similar bitchy complaints from a number of online publishers who simply haven't worked out that links from other sites are something to be encouraged because the drive traffic and boost search-engine ratings.
A great resource for those interested in the history, opinions and law on the matter of the legality of linking is the
Link Controversy page created and maintained by Stefan Bechtold.
Most publishers eventually realize that trying to block linking through the courts is a really dumb thing to do -- but there's always someone who simply doesn't get it."
Rights... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Clicking links is theft (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't believe that none of you got the joke/irony here. Calling someone collect means that they get to choose whether to pay to talk to you. Requesting a page from a web server means that the web server gets to choose whether to give you the page (possibly based on your referrer, etc). It is exactly like calling collect - the choice is entirely up to the responder, not the requester.
Basically aozilla agrees with everyone else, he/she just didn't include the smiley so that you could get the joke. So here it is:
:)
Re:Why can't they just block it (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Clicking links is theft (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't believe that none of you got the joke/irony here.
I can't either.
Calling someone collect means that they get to choose whether to pay to talk to you.
True...
Requesting a page from a web server means that the web server gets to choose whether to give you the page (possibly based on your referrer, etc).
True...
It is exactly like calling collect - the choice is entirely up to the responder, not the requester.
It's also exactly like... Receiving spam!!!
Basically aozilla agrees with everyone else, he/she just didn't include the smiley so that you could get the joke.
Yes, I do agree with everyone else that we shouldn't have laws against accessing websites or making collect calls.
Or spam!
Even DDOS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I do agree with everyone else that we shouldn't have laws against accessing websites or making collect calls. Or spam!
What about DDOS (distributed denial of service)? Should 13-year-olds have the right to flood you off the network by hammering your connection with thousands of well-formed HTTP requests?
Re:indeed (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.eff.org/Censorship/SLAPP/Cease-and-des
When you click on the following link in the page:3 -04
[penny-arcade.com]
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-0
You get:
http://www.idsa.com/piracy.html?date=2002-03-04 [idsa.com]
Cute huh?
-M
For bonus points, he might even stop it being linked in reference to the issue from this message.
Re:Fix your F$#%'n webserver then! (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.domain.com/2624764/restofpage.html
the numbers expire and if someone links to expired numbers then the get sent to where you want them to
could be the same page or anywhere else.
it's the web developers responsibility to be prepared for deep linking not the web site's lawyers!
Stealing Content and Representing it as Your Own (Score:5, Interesting)
We have no problem with people linking to our site [geartest.com].
What we DO take issue with is individuals and companies stealing our content by linking directly to it and representing it as their own.
This is most rampant with graphics. We try to provide high-quality images about the products we review and the items we write about. Everybody likes big and clear pictures.
Many of these have to be converted from massive TIFF files into Web-sized JPEGs or GIFs. It may not seem like a big deal, but it takes someone's time and effort to optimize every image and fit it within our internal site guidelines to make it as accessible as possible to Web surfers at large. That adds up to a lot of time and effort.
There are those companies who steal our content outright without any attribution whatsoever. A friend was talking to one of his colleagues, who told him that his previous employer regularly visited our site specifically to steal our graphics. (That site has since gone out of business).
And there are those offenders who link directly to our content on their sites -- again without attribution -- causing us to bear the bandwidth costs of transmitting hundreds of megabytes worth of data without any credit, benefit or return to us.
We have found our content abused on major sites (household names), without any response from the Web staff of those companies when we try to contact them about it.
Most of our content is available for syndication. If you like it and want to use it, ASK.
As a footnote, we are considering acquiring and implementing some form of digital rights management, which is something we don't want to do. However, if we continue to see this kind of content theft, then we need to get it under control before the costs reach a point where we are forced to shut down our site.