You Can't Link Here 325
An anonymous reader writes "Last year several news sources reported about the website dontlink.com from David Sorkin, associate professor of law at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago. His website fights 'stupid linking policies' that attempt to impose restrictions on other sites that link to them. Now a German law student joined the fight against linking restrictions and starts getting media attention in Germany. His list of stupid German linking policies can be found at the website Links & Law. Contrary to the model of dontlink.com, the German site refrains from linking to companies that prohibit linking without their consent. The site only states the URL of the websites with the linking policies.
The page with the linking policies is in German, but the rest of the website is in English and covers many legal aspects of linking."
Principles of Un-enforceable Rules (Score:5, Insightful)
More Stupid rules/laws can be found here. [ahajokes.com]
The fact of the matter is that it's impossible to hold any but the largest of businesses to such a silly policy. If they really don't want people to link to their stuff, don't put it where the public can get to it.
It's that simple.
Why so upset about this concept? (Score:4, Insightful)
I fail to see why this is a free speech issue.
Re:Why so upset about this concept? (Score:2, Insightful)
OK, but American Express? ExxonMobil? Orbitz? New York Stock Exchange and American Stock Exchange? I sincerely doubt any of these sites have any bandwidth problems and if you do, tough cookies. Nobody is forcing you to host a public website. Put a password on it and force people to apply for a username and password to get access to your site. Sure, 99.999% of your customers will never bother but you won't have to worry about deep linking anymore. The web was built around hyperlinking information. If you start arbitrarily cutting those links to certain sites then the thing will collapse and be useless. So why even bother having a web site if you don't want anyone pointing to it?
Re:Why so upset about this concept? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem sites have is they want you to go through all the ads before you hit what you actually want, and hopefully get lost in the store or something, nothing to do with bandwidth.
Re:Hypocrisy ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's can hardly be seen as hypocrisy when you consider the difference between your personal phone line and private residential address and a web site ostensibly for providing information to the public.
It gets even more silly to make this comparison when you look at how the WWW is intended to operate- the word "hypertext" isn't just fast words, it's about links. Requiring licenses to link is totally against the entire basis of the technology, and has been pointed out, patently absurd, as restrictions on linking are totally unenforceable in any meaningful sense.
Re:Hypocrisy ?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hypocrisy ?? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why so upset about this concept? (Score:3, Insightful)
In cases like that, you simply don't put stuff on the web. You don't use publically accessible protocols, like http. Use your own protocol, and don't share it with others.
That's a perfectly valid reason to deny other sites permission to link.
Stupidly wrong. The web is ALL about linking. If you don't want links, there is no acceptable way to rule them out, and no excuse for trying. As I've already said, if you don't want it to be linked to, don't put it on the web.
In anything, if you want to participate, you have to follow the rules. One of the most basic rules on the web is that linking is ok.
Re:Hypocrisy ?? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want people to read/obtain data on your web server, take it offline or put it behind some kind of access restriction. If it's a "public" web site, then I think the assumption should be that you want people to read it. The biggest difference is that for people to read your web site doesn't require your personal attention; you don't have to answer every HTTP/GET request individually, but you do have to answer your phone or let the machine get it.
Re:Maybe I'm in the minority here... (Score:4, Insightful)
All a "linking policy" can logically be is some kind of policy a site has for adding/deleting links on its OWN website, not dictating which sites others can link from.
Re:Principles of Un-enforceable Rules (Score:3, Insightful)
While we're sharing sites, don't forget Dumb Laws [dumblaws.com].
Re:Why so upset about this concept? (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember how www.microsoft.com got associated in Google as the #1 return for "Go to hell" for a while. That's because even though that phrase was nowhere on Microsoft's homepage, an organized effort of people associated that phrase with www.microsoft.com, so Google picked up on that and declared Microsoft the net's leading authority on going to hell..
Now, that's a rather tame embarassment for a company that you could argue deserved it, but a lot of Men in Suits are affraid that they could be associated with even less desirable terms in a way that damages PR.
The only problem is, "don't link to us" is about as legally valid as "don't talk about our website" which just isn't gonna fly.
Re:Not necessarily unenforceable (with commentary) (Score:5, Insightful)
And then the Judge says "show me where they agreed not to link to you" and throws the guy out of the court room.
make your site in flash like everyone else (Score:2, Insightful)
Links (Score:5, Insightful)
If they don't want links from a certain site just add another rule, if you don't want people accessing the site put a firewall up or password protect it. This silly business of linking laws is akin to me preventing people from making references to my businesses location. Or a grocery store owner preventing me from telling someone that the grocery store has Peanut Butter in isle 12.
I think people really need to grow up, anything I don't want linked to I password or otherwise protect.
Personally, I'd like to know what you would think if people started linking to unprotected SMB content.
killing HTTP referers (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not simply put the destination site into every referrer you send? You'd be telling the site that you've already be there.
I can't think of any specific reason to do that, just a fun exercise.
Re:2D analogy in a 3D world... (Score:2, Insightful)
As far as I am concerned, a link is like a card in a card catalog or a reference in a paper. It's just information about how to get someplace on the web, and nobody should be able to restrict another's dissemination of that information.
comment to any search engine guys (Score:4, Insightful)
%^)>
that ought to sort things out better for the PHBs at these various webpages
don't use the web then (Score:5, Insightful)
If corporations find that http is too loose & free for their lawyers liking they can invent and use something else. They are trying to have it both ways--and in the process expropriate a public resource.
Re:Is there a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
If this is an extension of the "passing off", where you deep-link to their website and claim its your own work, then it seems fine.
Or does it mean that every time I have to link to them, I have to show the full URL? This could be tedious, as seen in
It's not clear which is prohibited, which is the problem.
-Zipwow
Re:Hypocrisy ?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Taken as a whole, the Internet is the same way. Most resources available are private, they are not presumed to be public. However, just like signs indicate that a building is public, an Internet protocol can by convention be presumed public, such as HTTP. Most HTTP servers not behind firewalls are public. Placing restrictions on entry, such as password requirements, can act as a "sign" indicating that something is not unrestricted. That's why you don't have a right to go trying to randomly log into telnet servers and password-protected web sites.
I don't think these issues are particularly hard to figure out, but a lot of people seem to have trouble. That's because they often aren't taking common sense expectations into account and instead are arguing from strongly abstracted positions. The public/private building analogy is apt, because it forces one to think about why it is that it's pretty clear that you can't go walking into people's homes even though there's so many public buildings around. The same sort of common sense reasoning about where one has and doesn't have a right to wander in the real world applies in the virtual world.
In this particular issue, these sites that want to prohibit deep linking fail to make convicing arguments because a) they're not actually controlling access to these pages and so there's a presumption that they're fully public; and, b) the whole argument is moot because linking is only a pointer and is not access in any sense.
Re:Why so upset about this concept? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, but that would be YOUR content, not using another's content directly off their webpage to give associated messages that they did not directly give.. and making them pay for it to boot. That ISN'T freedom of expression. That's theft of services.
Re:Why so upset about this concept? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not necessarily unenforceable (with commentary) (Score:2, Insightful)
To preventing framing there's a little javascript I've seen (somewhere; I didn't bookmark it) which checks if your're framed and reloads the page. I think you have to use javascript to open someone else's page in a frame anyhow; so either way you win.
You can tell all of the major search sites to not cache and/or not index your page in robots.txt. I'm not sure why any commercial site would want to be NOT indexed by search engines, but wtf.. if you want it you only have to ask!
It is utterly utterly STUPID to involve lawyers for something like this when there are such trivial technical solutions.
Infringes free speech!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
My company's link policy (Score:1, Insightful)
The practice of using redirectors and target pages has seen use of the exact META TAGS we have on our site. We have asked and successfully had a number of pages removed due to the copyright we carry on our specific meta tags. (eg. we're a franchising company, some online ink companies are using our exact meta tags including 'franchise' when they have nothing to do with any franchise)
We have also had a few pages removed that link to our website within an html frame. everyone we ask is prompt to have the offending pages/links removed.
It's in our best interest, as a growing company, to have as many pages pointing to our website as possible. Before I started there, they were attempting to set up a reciprocal link program. with the retailers carrying our products. It never happened, but anyways.
My point being that linking is good - except for the big companies with issues.
Re:Not necessarily unenforceable (with commentary) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Principles of Un-enforceable Rules (Score:2, Insightful)
Accordingly, the percentage of politicians who intend to expand the powers of government is much higher than the percentage who intend to limit the powers of government. Those who prefer to mind their own business and take responsibility for their own lives aren't nearly as interested in gaining power as those who want to control others. This is precisely why governments tend to expand throughout their existence, and precisely why the US government costs more today (in terms of both tax dollars and civil liberty) than it did in the past.