Restrictive Linking Policies & The Net

Masem writes "News.com reports on a new site set up by Prof. David Sorkin of the John Marshall Law School that points out web sites with restrictive linking policies, entitled Don't Link To Us. Sorkin set up the site as a way to enlighten net users on the impact of such policies in the aftermath of past and pending court cases over deep linking policies. An owner of one site on the list, law.com, was suprised to discover that their site has a restrictive linking policy, and already plans to implement changes to it."

Beautiful

Thats really beautiful: a list of people who don't want to be linked to, and each entry is a working link to them. I wonder how many letters they get saying "Please do not link to us from your Do not link to us page"?

More Beautiful

It would be more beautiful if they threaten legal action. Saying to Sorkin that the if he "wants to avoid the expense of having to hire a lawyer.....that he must take down those links.

This is almost as good as going against someone who buys their ink by the barrel.

Lets see, 1 law professor, 20 students needed project for class. Hmmmm.....

Simple way to accomplish this....

There is a simple way to keep people from linking to your site, just find your webserver, and unplug the network connection. And next week, we talk about people who hang signs in their window, but don't want people looking at them.

Re:Simple way to accomplish this....

There's another way, with fewer side effects. . .

Just find your webserver and configure it to check the referer field and enforce your policy. If it means enough to you to have a policy (and sue), why not enforce it? This was brought up during some of these court cases. To me, that should have reduced any damage claims to zero, but it didn't.

Say what?

Law.com was surprised that their website had a policy that they and their lawyers had ccoked up restricting linking? Why were they surprised? Did this policy get published by little policy fairies in the middle of the night without law.com's knowledge or consent.

Puhlease!

If you don't want people linking...

First if you don't want people linking to your site at all, you are just an idiot and shouldn't be allowed to have a website at all.

But secondly, and this is usually mentioned when this comes up, but I'll say it again.

If you don't want people deep linking into your site, put some sort of CGI in place. Either with refer checking, cookies, or a server side stateful mechinism that tracks a visitors progress through the site. The first two can be defeated if someone really wants in, but will stop most linking.

But this is just stupid anyway. If people weren't ment to link between sites it would have been called the World Wide Line, or the World Wide Collection-of-Sites-that-You-Have-to-Remember-Ever y-URL-For.

Re:If you don't want people linking...

Indeed. Any webserver lets you do this with relative ease. Don't allow any referrer other than your own site. Redirect all referred hits to /index.html or whatever. But for the love of $deity, stop trying to legislate things that have absolutely no reason to be legislated.

what i dont get...

is why they're trying legal (as in using the law) approaches to technical problems, something that normally cannot be done. Technical problems need technical solutions.

In this case - checking referrer tags in http requests and blocking them as appropriate instead of litigating the defendant into removing a link.

Linking vs Spam

What i don't understand is how people can get up-in-arms when organizations attempt to prevent people from linking to their site, yet at the same time lament the increase of spam in their inboxes.

It seems to me that three of the linchpins of the arguments for, say, making spam illegal are 1) the email was unsolicited, 2) the spam potentially interferes with "legitimate" emails, and 3) the downloading of spam can force the recipient to incur costs he did not intend to.

These arguments can be made for unsolicited/unapproved deep-or-otherwise- linking. Often links to websites - and the manner in which they are linked - imply a relationship or endorsement of a website that an organization might not accept. Unauthorized links to websites can interfere with normal traffic to that website, at times bringing such services down, - as surely users of Slashdot know. And moreover, unauthorized links - again, as from Slashdot - can force users to incur not-insubstantial bandwidth costs.
So from this analysis, if making spam illegal is a desirable goal - and it seems to be from the cheers here whenever charges are pressed against spammers - then I think it's difficult to simultaneously rationalize and argument against companies' attempts to control linkage to their sites.

Re:Linking vs Spam

The difference is the burden of cost.

A web site is pubilshed with the intent of being publicly viewable. While the /. effect (and similar problems from news sites) can cause problems, the content was placed there for public release and viewing. Generally web pages are placed on high-capacity ISP's. By publishing, you are explicitly offering it to the public. If the individual has a problem with their bandwidth agreement (such as automatically charging more rather than capping use) then it is the individual's problem, not the community's. It is of the form that the publisher pays to publish, and the viewer pays costs associated for viewing, and both consent to those fees.

An email box is a low-bandwidth item where everything must be reviewed by hand. Spam is unsolicited and can cost a significant amount to the reciever without their consent.

So in my view, posting and linking imply consent, spam is without consent. That's where the law should come in -- just like sex with consent is okay, but without consent is rape.

frob.

Got to love HIS linking policy!

Don't Link to Us! links to sites that attempt to impose substantial restrictions on other sites that link to them. The Linking Policy for Don't Link to Us! precludes us from requesting permission to link to a site, and compels us to link directly to the targeted page (i.e., a "deep link") rather than to a site's home page. Descriptions of sites' linking policies generally are accurate (though often not complete) at the time they are posted here but are likely to change over time. On occasion a web site will modify its linking policy in response to public ridicule. Perhaps their appearance in Don't Link to Us! will help encourage some of these sites to move forward into the 20th century.

Rock on, dude.

--Jim

In related news...

The famous website The Register prohibits linking to its stories... Seems to be only from their own ISP, but I have no time to investigate further.

Link to the Kuro5hin article [kuro5hin.org]

So stupid

Deep linking is one of those "it doesn't matter" issues. Is it legal to stop people from posting deep links? Can it be legally enforced? Who cares? 30 seconds with the web server configuration and the entire problem is solved forever. It would be like suing google for posting links to the site, without even going to the effort of adding a robots.txt file.

I get the feeling that its not the IT departments of these companies that are making these demands. I can't imagine that they would be so hopelessly inept as to propose such solutions to problems that can be easily solved without ever talking to a lawyer.

-Restil

You know who else hates linking..the ASCAP mafia..

ASCAP! The mafia that controls music. There's a great story at wired about travelfinder.com's links to radio stations [wired.com].

ASCAP wanted them to fork over royalty fees even though the music wasn't archived on their site! The links were clearly denoted as external.

Then again this isn't suprising behavior considering that ASCAP tried to strongarm the girl scouts into paying royalties for songs sung around the campfire [umkc.edu].

Whats next?

Requiring people to get permission before citing sources in bibliographies?

The /. effect commeth... ?

Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Note: This site exceeded its bandwidth allocation, and so I'm in the process of moving it to a new hosting service

I think he might be in for a surprise performance test just one week later.

mod_rewrite is your friend

With over half the traffic to content-full sites coming in from search engines which my their nature deep link, it's vital for webmasters to use tools like Apache's mod_rewrite [apache.org] to be sure to present the content in the context you desire. By combining this with functions in scripting languages such as PHP you can make absolutely certain that you (1) welcome visitors however they arrive and (2) let them know exactly where they are, with navigation options that will lead them further into your site, rather than the referrer's.

The point isn't to send the people away who, through no fault of their own, don't arrive by the front door. The point is to convert them to your own customers.

One response

I checked through some of the links to try to find out why some of these sites don't want to be linked to. On thing that came out is that there is a mass of confused thinking and motivation out there. So don't expect a clean solution to this problem. A solution which will satisfy one set of paranoid suits will not satisfy the others.

One of the reasons is that they fear that the appearans of a link from you to them implies some sort of reciprocal approval i.e. that they know of and might be assumed to approve of you. Now, to anyone here, this is absolutely dumb, but corporate zecks and AOLers might not know better.

So here is an idea of how to deal with them. When they post court papers (which are surely public documents), post a reciprocal set of papers requiring them to remove your name, addresss, URL etc. from their papers because they imply they you endorse them etc. Use wording as close as possible to theirs and petition that your case be heard first.

One of two things happen: either the court is sensible and throws out your petition as riduculous, in which case you return with that rejection as a precedent, set in the same court, to justify your linking. Or the court grants your loony case, in which case (by the court's own loguic) they have to withdraw their case against you.

Simple Solution

Well, there is a simple solution... if you run a web site and don't want links to yours, use Apache and install mod_rewrite. Then it's a simple matter of defining rewrite rules in your base .htaccess file that check the HTTP_REFERER value - if your own domain (or any authorized domain you wish to define) is not in your list, the user can either be redirected to your home page (stop deep linking only) or to a "don't link to us" page, or direct to a 403:

Hree's my favorite - created for a friend who didn't want folks including her images in their siges by link:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://foo\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /image_directory.* [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.jpg /graphics/linked.gif

This one should just give the bugger a 403 if they link directly to anything on your site - might have to add exclusionary logic for the home page to avoid locking everyone out.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://foo\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]

my comment

hi, welcome to my comment. if you are reading this comment, then you must have web surfed through slashdot to get to it. web surfing is a strange, complex, newfangled technical concept that you may not understand, because i certainly don't understand it myself. that's why i publish my comments to this weird web surfing place to begin with. see?

the point is i don't allow people to web surf to my comments. i only explicitly allow people to view my comments who contact me first. that is why i post comments on slashdot in the first place. do you get it?! good, because i don't. but i have the right to dictate to you how it works even though i don't understand it. ok?! ok?!

now that you have read this comment, please email me and get permission first before you read this comment in the first place! understand?! no???!!! DO I HAVE TO SUE YOU NOW?! ;-P

how can anyone legally deny a link?

I'm never going to profess to be an expert on this topic, but here's my take on it:

It's not illegal for me to refer you to Joe's Pizza. I could also tell you where Joe's Pizza is and supply you with directions. I could also tell you where to find the Joe's Pizza menu (for example's sake, on the counter by the cash register, in the restaurant).

So where's the difference if:

My website refers you to Joe's Pizza website, and I supply you with directions (which in the context of the internet is providing a URL) and I tell you where to find Joe's Pizza menu (propviding a deep link).

If Joe doesn't want you coming in his restaurant, he can deny you entry, and it's the same with the website, but is there any legal ground for a person or business to prevent another person or business from making references, regardless of whether they are hypertext links or word of mouth? Couldn't this almost be a constitutional issue?

Grrr!!

Once again, western ideals here folks. Lots of sites in Japan have very explict no linking policies, and it is considered perfectly polite to make such requests (and down right rude to not obey them!)

While I will admit that commerical sites with no linking policies /is/ rather st00pid, the fact is that:

The site belongs to the owner

The owner is paying for bandwidth and hosting

The owner can invite who ever they want on to their site.

Now granted /sueing/ over such issues is rather stupid, but if some site sends you a 'please take down your link to our site' letter then hey, it IS their site. They where actualy nice enough to warn you, they could have just shoved up a HTTP referer block and said screw you to your content. (admitedly many of the idiot admins who do the cease and desist letters are to stupid to figure out how to do such but. . . . heh)

Re:Vegan.com Links to Huntington Life Sciences

Despite the fact that they kill cute puppies, I have to respect the fact that they were smart enough to find the simple, technical, and completely legal way to get what they wanted, rather than throwing lawyers at the problem and costing both themselves and you a trememdous amount of money.