You Can't Link Here

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."

Maybe there just scared

These companies probably don't allow linking because they are afraid of a slashdotting.

Re:Maybe there just scared

These are very important rules here people! How hard is it to obey a disclaimer by not copying material or hyperlinking to it? Their Disclaimer clearly states

"American Express prohibits caching, unauthorized hypertext links to the Site and the framing of any Content available through the Site"

It really says this... go ahead and read it [americanexpress.com].

And by the way, be sure to disable caching or history in your browser before visiting the site.

Re:Maybe there just scared

If the page loads too slow, you might want to try Google's cached copy [216.239.57.100].

Principles of Un-enforceable Rules

An unenforceable rule is almost always a stupid rule.

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.

Re:Not necessarily unenforceable (with commentary)

>>It's not completely unenforceable. You just need to look at yer HTTP_REFERER log to see who is linking to you. Then you just bring up their site, print it out, and take it to the judge.

And then the Judge says "show me where they agreed not to link to you" and throws the guy out of the court room.

Re:Principles of Un-enforceable Rules

Ahahahaha.

Chico, California: Detonating a nuclear device within the city limits results in a $500 fine.

Re:Principles of Un-enforceable Rules

And now it's statewide. A new law just went into effect [sfgate.com] as of the first of the year:

From now on, anyone caught using nuclear weapons in California must give a sample to the state's DNA registry of criminals. No longer will nuclear holocaust get in the way of unsolved crimes.

Nehmen die Plakate viel der Drogen kürzlich?

Nehmen die Plakate viel der Drogen kürzlich? Mit allem passenden Respekt uns ist zu informieren über jemand anderes, das bereits erfolgtes etwas tut - auf Deutsch nichtsdestoweniger - nicht dieses germane. Ich würde nicht sein, also störte, wenn ich nicht mehrere meiner eigenen Unterordnungen - die gute - zusammenfassend vor kurzem zurückgewiesen gesehen hatte.

I am a WHORE!

Translated Site [google.com]

If this has already been posted, please mod /. as slower than poo. If not, enjoy the whore.

Whore!

Why so upset about this concept?

Maybe somebody has an underpowered server, or pays a high rate for bandwidth usage. Such people would prefer to avoid a /.ing that would kill their mission-critical machine or drive them into the poorhouse. That's a perfectly valid reason to deny other sites permission to link.

I fail to see why this is a free speech issue.

Re:Why so upset about this concept?

It's deep-linking that's the problem, not linking in general. It takes much more bandwidth to load the main page and click to the page you want then to just link straight to the page you want.

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.

taboo links

www.kpmg.com [kpmg.com]

silly bastards, if they don't want to be linked, they shouldn't have a web page. They should invent thier own non-http protocol that doesn't allow linking, or more importantly, allows restriction of linking. As long as their using our protocol, they have to play by our rules.

nah nah nah naaaah naaaahh

Maybe I'm in the minority here...

But if you don't like someone's linking policy, don't link to them.

It is, and should be, up to the owners and operators of a given website to determine their linking policy. If said policy is stupid, so be it, it's stupid. There's no reason that a website should be required to let anyone link to them however they wish.

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority here...

And how do you expect to ever get traffic?

Re:Maybe I'm in the minority here...

I think you're missing the larger point. A hyperlink belongs to the person who creates it, not to the entity it points to. Saying otherwise is like saying I can't speak your name without your permission, or that I'm not allowed to send you a letter without your express permission..

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.

It's important to remember that when Linking...

You don't forget the Tri-Force.

And don't leave home without your magic boomerang either.

.

This just in....

Slashdot is the biggest offender of bad linking practices. Its users bring down a stagering 2 million sties a year due to its linking to anything with a "http://" in the address. Kharma Whores are thought to be at the top of the /. list of offenders. Catch the full expose on HardCopy at 9.

Irritating behavior

If you don't want people reading your web pages and linking to them (or not) on their own initiative then don't publish web pages. Linking is a fundamental characteristic of the web. Objecting to it is like putting up a road-side billboard and then objecting when passing motorists read it ("Oh, but I only intended pedestrians to read my billboard!").

Come to think of it, I can't imagine why the producer of legitimiate information would object to having it linked from other pages in whatever way suits the linking page. So we're once again down to defending the corporation's right to profit. Sigh.

Where would /. be without cross linking?

I wonder if anyone at /. has considered the implications of restricting cross linking. It's really sad what the Internet is being relegated into. Not do we all have to battle spam, pop-ups (pop-unders), banners and other type of promotions, reducing the average site's visible editorial content down to less than 50% ... P2P is being curtailed of course and cross linking might be illegal at some point or might be so restricted that forums such as /. might risk a law suit or an injunction every time it adds a story.

Is that really what we all envisioned the Web would turn into? It's just further proof that powers in charge do not consider us to be individuals with an intellect but just as simple-minded consumers who must be herded towards maximum profit margin. Sorry for sounding so disenchanted, but when I remember the 'old' Web - I find it just disgusting what this is all turning into...

The last few sentences of his webpage...

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. (emphasis mine)

But perhaps they've changed their policies in the last 100 years??...

Err...history

If my recollection is correct, all this linking silliness was started a few years ago by http://www.ticketmaster.com getting annoyed about deep links to their site. The really silly thing about this whole issue was that the possibility of links is what motivated the very development of the HTTP standards. Do the outfits that want to regulate linking really expect us to turn back the clock? Even the venerable old gopher system encouraged links! What is that old line about folks who forget their history...?

the amex site does NOT

even mention not linking to them but has a dislcaimer to any third party links they post. Sorkin needs to proof read some of his stuff before posting it...I found numerous mistakes in his posts...

if you don't want to be linked..

...then make your site unlinkable(at least no deep linking), or all in flash so no one wants to link to it, or better yet just don't put any interesting information that people would want to link to yur site, kinda like M$.com (ooh that gratuitous microsoft hack)!!

German policies

It seems strange that a country that is openly embracing Linux and the open source movement, also says you cant link to thier sites. What is with that?

Linking practices....

you know if "they" don't want people linking directly to images or certain pages - it's very easy to set this up...

take a look at game faqs for example and how they don't allow outside links to directly point to there faqs.txt file for games.

any site should be able to link to any site IMHO

Ultimatum?

Perhaps the solution to all this nonsense is to get the browser publishers to get together and tell all the webmasters (via press release or what have you) that if they don't stop pissing on the entire PURPOSE of the web, that the referrer functionality will be removed from the browsers, and then they'll NEVER know where their visitors are coming from.

It's obvious these jackasses don't know their asses from their elbows when it comes to their asses and elbows, let alone how "teh Intarweb" works. They're not going to listen to reason, so just give them an ultimatum they can't ignore.

Why? Is this a particularly bad place to link.

This is our website, you cannot link here!

make your site in flash like everyone else

Seriously if you dont want deep linkers just use flash or use some other worthlessly NON-Navigable page designs

Links

Hrmm... with a few mod rewrite rules any site that doesnt wish to be linked to can redirect the request.

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.

just found an interesting article

Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] has a very insightfull article about the ethics of linkage [kuro5hin.org].

Check this out

Don't like linking? Use technology to fix.

I don't get it. Why do they even have linking policies. A simple few lines of code in the top of the page could check the referrer and if it was from "outside" then redirect them. Problem solved.

You can also so do this for frames with javascript. A few lines would check to see if the page was in a frame and if it was it moves out of the frame.

I have implemented both these solutions. I am so sick of threats in policies and EULAs. If you dont want people coming into your house just lock freaking the door. Simple as that.

Ironic

I now know what that site is about, but when I first read this submission, I thought it was funny to see a link to dontlink.com

killing HTTP referers

At the risk of violating the dmca, how can I block those HTTP refferer things? Does the browser produce them? It has to, right? Are there any browsers out there that allow you to "play" with that information?

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.

comment to any search engine guys

--yo, if any search engine doods are reading, please, take these websites' wishes to heart, don't have them show up in any of your searches! No links is "no links", give them what they want.

%^)>

that ought to sort things out better for the PHBs at these various webpages

don't use the web then

If corporations don't like the idea of people hyper-linking they should use a different protocol then http. It's that simple--if you use the web then you agree to the concept of hyper-linking. It's a foundation of the technology.

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.

Why they do it

I think this is an extremely stupid law that says dont refer to me. They could extend it to "pointing a finger (any) at anyone is illegal". Suddenly referring to people in text also becomes illegal and so do all newspapers and history books.

"A certain somebody created 3 laws of Physics. A certain somebody else disproved him".

The real concept of illegal links is to enforce the reader to read everything from the home page and navigate to the point of information. They want to push popup ads and not have misconceptions by people who read only part of what the site has to say. But the solution is smarter design of websites..

Another reason why they do it is to have the person download files from their site after reading their text and possibly filling out their forms. Most sites have successfully achieved this by random subdirectories as in fileplanet.com. Companies with highly inept web maintainers are recommended to use laws rather than smart site designs to achieve their results. Since the tech world is economically down and skilled technicians commonly available, such companies are requested to quitely do a seach on dice.com and workopolis for resumes, and replace their System/Network Admins with people who can get the job done.

simple work-around.

there are several ways to block unwanted links to a server. you can prevent x-linking of pictures or detect a link from an other site with the http-referer.

BUT.

insead of linking directly to an other page you can use this:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; url=http://www.forbidden.to/link/to/this/page.html ">

this will generate no referer. or to put it differently, the referer looks the same as if it were a bookmark. ans if you would stop people from bookmarking your site you're really stupid ;-)

If you can't link to them...

If a company such as American Express doesn't want me to link to them, what if I provided a link on my site such as americanexpress.com [visa.com]? You don't actually own the representation of the human-readable address, do you?

(Just for grins, compare sections three and eight of the American Express rules & regs [americanexpress.com].)

Reminds me of FuckGeneralMotors or something...

Remember when 2600 created a domain that either blasted general motors or ford (can't remember which) and linked it to the opposing company's site? This reminds me of that... Except, 2600 WON that case.

Big Hairy Deal...

Why do so many /.ers get their panties in a twist over this issue? Site $foo doesn't want you to link to them - so the fuck what? Were you _really_ going to link to them anyway? Really? It seems like people go out of their way to find sites with restrictive linking policies, just so they can get everyone all steamed up about it.

I know this whole post sounds like a troll, but really, I'm curious - how often have you desperately wanted to link to a site, yet found out you couldn't because of restrictive linking policies.

Also, here's another serious question. Say I publish a cool Lego Mindstorm project on my website, with a bunch of JPEGs. I'm hosted via a cable modem, so if I exceed a certain amount of bandwidth, I'm SOL and have to pay more money. Some guy finds my website, and submits it to Slashdot. Suddenly, my traffic spikes, and I'm over my monthly limit in just 24 hours. Is that fair?

Yes, you can say "You shouldn't have put up the page if you didn't want people to see it", but do you, honestly, every time you put up a website, anticipate that it will be /.ed? No, of course you don't. So now, this huge traffic spike costs me real money. I have two choices: a) Create a linking policy; b) Remove my content. Chances are I'll choose (b), since I know /.ers will thumb their noses at (a). So now, the web has lost some content, and nobody benefits.

You want to say linking policies are stupid? Fine. Want to say they're useless? Fine. That's well within your rights. But what do you propose sites do to combat the /. effect?

Public, Yet Secret

The business section of my local (Minneapolis/St. Paul) phone book begins with a series of entries named "A", each with its own phone number.

Curious what business goes on at "A", my friend and I called one of the numbers.

We asked, "What do you do?"

The man at "A" replied: "I can't tell you that."

And I still don't know what they do at "A".

Uh oh...

I wonder if Slashdot posting this counts as a link to links to forbidden sites... That's probably supposed to be illegal too.

Cat

cat stupidsites >> hosts.deny

You can link to THIS site

<offtopic>A shameless but important plug. Please link to this site. [slaverready.com] It's about a temp company, Labor Ready, that is exploiting it's workers.</offtopic> If you are feeling particularly angry at the company after reading about them, post their logo on your website.

Thanks!

Infringes free speech!!!

I view any attempt to legally enforce a policy forbidding me to deep-link into a publicly accessable website as an infringement of my constitutional rights of free speech. and free press. Would there be any question about this if I were to address an audience and verbally (or by handout) give them the deep URL?

what the hell.....

When I get a billion dollars after suing Microsoft for those "rattlebox" XBOX controllers....RSI injuries...and that uPNP exploit....I will buy myself an isle and make my own country...

These will be the software rules there..

1. Software patents don't exist.

2. What is Software Piracy? It's All Free! ShareReactor Jindabad...

3. Who said Amazon Owns One-Cick buying...i own it...This is my country..

4. Everyone should submit the ratings about how much "virtual damage" they did to each software company by pirating their software...and I will issue prizes for each $1 Billion...

alas....microsoft will be the first one to invade my country.....

Corporations will own armies in future...(ahem..didnt' they own armies in the past? East india company?)

Orbitz linking policy..

I happened to notice that Orbitz.com apparently has a no linking policy. Which is OK, considering that nearly every major website out there vomits forth an Orbitz.com pop-up. You can't link to them, but they can bombard you with pop-ups. Jerks.

How to be stupid...

It would be trivial to write a web-server rule to check the HTTP-REFERER and not display the page if it is being linked from outside the site... Of course, if you did this, you would lose out on th eexpense and bad press that you get from taking Joe's blog to court for linking directly to your order page for your product.

Bookmarks

Okie, i reckon 90% of peoples bookmarks will be deep links. So that means bookmarks are illegal. If you want to take that to the next stage, you can look at a bookmark list as a Bibliography for a project or paper you are writing. As you are technically deep linking into journals, archives or librarys. So that would mean bibliographys are illegal (esp. As papers are more and more being handed in a pure digital format, with there bib's as hyperlinks). So why does every school /collage/uni insist on you writing illegal texts. When they jump on any illegal practice.

My company's link policy

I work for a company with a new and sensitive concept, stepping all over a bunch of major company's feet. We're in the ink business. There are tons of ink companies on the internet that we don't consider competition - we have a direct-to-consumer model for shopping malls, and our retail website is a very minor sideline. We have become a recognized brand in Canada, and so some people have found it neccesary to link to us from their webpages.

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.

what?

"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"

isn't this still linking? instead of a hyper link, the user has to cut and paste address. The result being going from there site a to site b. In my mind thats still a link. Are these people having issues with "linking" or "hyperlinking". Becuase if there having issues with "linking". Then they should not be listed in any search engine, or any website, or if you push argument even father, it also shouldn't be listed on paper. I hope the people who have issues with "linking", if there are any, have really simple domain names. Becuase the only way I can think of to access the site would be to type in random names and see what popes up. Further more, what the heck are they whining about? Who actually complains about haveing to much traffic? If your making a website for yourself, use htaccess or something. If your making a website for the public, then expect traffic. As for the people who want to avoid things like slashdoting, suck it up. If you cant cant handle the heat, get out of the water. The solution to the problem is diffenetly not get rid of linking. If you want to limit traffic that badly, just use a friggin firewall.

Don't

Don't link
Don't point
Don't recommend
Don't support
Don't save
Don't forward
Don't cite
Don't comment
Don't argue
Don't protest
Don't ask
Don't learn
Don't remember
Don't read
Don't look
Don't think!
Don't live!
Don't exist!

not linking per se, but attributes of linking

There are a couple of common mistakes in other replies to this thread:

1) the fact that you allow your website to exist is an implied license to allow for linking to your website, so linking _per se_ is not an issue, but the issue is the context of the link and whether it is misleading or inappropriate in some way (such as the link suggesting a false endorsement, or an untrue fact that is libelious, etc). It's entirely fair to allow a website to place _some_ _reasonable_ restrictions on how other websites can link to it, and it's entirely fair and appropriate to apply existing issues of fair dealing, passing off, law of confidentiality, law of tort, etc. The issue is that there finer point sof how these laws / principles allow is not yet fleshed out - it's a bit pointless to thow up very abstract statements about "deep linking = yes / no", as the answer will be either depending upon various other attributes and circumstance.

2) using technical issues (e.g. HTTP_REFER blocking) to prevent inbound deep / inappropriate links is not entirely all of the issue, part of the issue is that there still exists an inappropriate link on another website (e.g. a link to other_host/internal/junk/etc potentially reveals misleading information "internal/junk/etc" and disrupts legitimate user activity); sure I redirect those inappropriate links, but it potentially damages the experience for my users, and leads to a loss of goodwill for my business/website, potentially because users are mislead into thinking that my website is inappropriately configured, or find it a nuisance, or something else). again, I would say that the rule is not hard and fast either way and the law requires depending of some general principles / doctrines, and an understandign that within those, there is scope for variation depending upon particular circumstances of the case in question.

Are they legally allowed to deny links?

After all, the linking pages aren't actually contacting the site. No law against publishing the address of a secret military base; why should there be one for web pages?

linking

Who cares? It's not about good or evil, only about action and consequence and who amongst us wants to constrain the right of any other individual to do as he/she pleases so long us they do us no harm. There can be sound technical/other reasons in trying to limit the traffic to what they can handle, want or wish. Maybe they like long weekends, fishing and dalliance in preference to making a million. It's their problem, their action and their consequences to deal with. Phooey.

Linking, Spam and DRM

Controlling how others may use or refer to you or your information is tough. It's a major problem with access controll lists - how do you KEEP someone from adding your name to a mail distribution list, ala SPAM, for instance?

SPAM is just an anauthorized link (email referance) to your email account. I'd sure like to be able to restrict those links, and have registered in several "do not call" lists to inhibit telemarketers from calling my home phone.

That's a Digital Rights Management issue - how do I CONSTRAIN what others may do with information I publish (my email address, my web links, etc.)

I wonder, too, if one of the reasons for the do-not-link policies is to fullfill the obligation of affirmative enforcement required of trade mark / service mark holders?

Re:Hypocrisy ??

Having a public website, a public server, implies that you are willing to serve content to the public. If you aren't, then you either need to add access restrictions, or take it down. Whether that means referer checking, a user login, or whatever, that's up to the owner.

Re:Hypocrisy ??

Linking to someone's website and not wanting to receive spam or telemarketing are different and therefore no hypocrisy is involved

It would only be hypocrisy if they had their own sites and did not want people to link to them but still wanted to link to anyone they liked
-OR-
The didnt want to receive spam and telemarketing but wanted to be free to indulge in it themselves spamming and making telemarketing calls to anyone they liked.

Re:Hypocrisy ??

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:Hypocrisy ??

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 ??

No. By linking to a site, you're not bugging the owner of the site (short of using a little bandwidth).

Re:Hypocrisy ??

Because a website has always been a "public face" to the world. It is a 'mostly' static information repository, much like a book. Calling someone on the phone is different. The author's of books don't normally give explicit rules on who can read their book, or how to read it. If an author wants to do this with his book, he doesn't let the public have access to it!! Maybe that's why webpage writers are usually called authors. If you want a public webpage, don't place rules on how it is to be used. If you don't want the public to use your page other ways than you intend, don't make a public webpage!!

Re:Hypocrisy ??

No.

The equivalent to requiring explicit permission before emailing me would be requiring explicit permission before VISITING my website.

Linking to a website is a pointer. It is akin to posting a mailto: link - which while generally causes your mailbox to be more likely to be spam harvested, does not actually result directly in anything appearing in your mailbox.

Re:Hypocrisy ??

Did you really think this one through? If I put up a server (or even just a site on geocities) on the Web, that very act implies that I am soliciting traffic.

If I were to send Alan Ralsky my email address and then complain about spam...THAT would be hypocrisy. But anyone putting a website on the World Wide Web is offering their site to...well, the world. :)

In deference to many posts below, I do believe that the "slashdot effect" is an unfortunate compliment to many unsuspecting websites. But I'll be the first to defend /. against any idiot that tries to sue because of some stupid "linking policy".

--K.