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."
Hypocrisy ?? (Score:0, Interesting)
taboo links (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Where would /. be without cross linking? (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Not necessarily unenforceable (with commentary). (Score:2, Interesting)
How does the linker not get caught? Just add this to the web site:
--naked [slashdot.org]
I agree with this post ... (Score:2, Interesting)
An example: A web site at a university that hosted previous exam papers as PDF documents. This was available to everyone in the World until some Professor thought that this was a bad thing because some other schools might "copy" courses by studying the old exam questions.
So now, it is restricted to on-campus IPs. ANYONE could just forward the documents on though and ANYONE can just come into a library and photocopy the exam papers. Dear god.
They want to publish but not hang the dirty laundry out
Re:Principles of Un-enforceable Rules (Score:2, Interesting)
There are plenty of stupid server tricks available to make it impossible to link from outside the site.
Yes, but many of those tricks also make it impossible for people to see your site at all. Cookies are disabled on some clients, referrer headers are removed on some proxies who like privacy, not everyone enables javascript, etc.
Why they do it (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Big Hairy Deal... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Don't like linking? Use technology to fix. (Score:3, Interesting)
How to be stupid... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bookmarks (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't (Score:3, Interesting)
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!