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New Orbitz Terms Prohibit Inbound Deep Linking 524

chekovma writes "Orbitz has announced a new set of Terms and Conditions that take effect March 12th which require anyone who uses their website (creates an account there) to follow strict inbound linking rules. These rules prohibit a user from creating even a plain text link to orbitz.com without first notifying them and require a user to take down such a link at their desire. It also disallows any deep linking -- meaning even this post violates those terms and conditions."
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New Orbitz Terms Prohibit Inbound Deep Linking

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  • by Ads are broken ( 718513 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:35AM (#11666690)
    I just wanted to tell you how much I love you! Have a great day!
  • Hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gowen ( 141411 )
    Orbitz has silly new rules for users.

    So don't use them.

    Duh.
    • Cache of links (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BobPaul ( 710574 ) *
      Someone should maintain a cache of links to the Orbitz site. Just a list in an html with all of the non-member accessible URIs you can find.

      Since non-members aren't bound by this agreement, it'd be interesting to see what actions (if any) they would take. ;)
  • Free advert (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jolyonr ( 560227 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:36AM (#11666701) Homepage
    Ok, they have some unenforcable legal nonsense in their terms & conditions, but does that justify giving them a free advert on slashdot?
    • Well, someone needs to advertise for them, because they are about to fall of all search engines. Google, who needs 'em?
    • by unassimilatible ( 225662 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @10:19AM (#11667041) Journal
      Deep Link Away [wired.com].

      Or maybe, Legality of 'Deep Linking' Remains Deeply Complicated [beachbrowser.com]

      BTW, anyone who reads this post owes me $20, that's my TOS.

  • Come on... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by djkitsch ( 576853 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:37AM (#11666703)
    How about someone sits them down and explains what would happen to the web if everyone had this policy?

    Jesus, you'd think their web developers would have pointed out their stupidity - or maybe I'm just being naive.
    • Jesus, you'd think their web developers would have pointed out their stupidity - or maybe I'm just being naive.


      Oh, I'm sure they did. PHB's all the way.
      • Yeah, I pretty much assumed that - but isn't it better to have a *little* faith in human intelligence? OK, now I *am* being naive :-)
    • Re:Come on... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ecklesweb ( 713901 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:47AM (#11666780)
      I think your only naiveté is believing that the managers who made the decision lend any weight to what their web developers tell them.
    • How about we look towards the day when this DOES happen.. Between this sort of garbage and the governments controlling content ( like the Nazi issues with google ) the 'web' is toast..

      Oh, dont forget the attack on p2p technology .. and the constant barrage of spam.. and viruses... and restrictive patenting everything under the sun.. ( hmm i claim rights for the sun.. )

      Its a matter of time.. Enjoy it while you can.

    • Re:Come on... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Deathlizard ( 115856 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @11:41AM (#11667909) Homepage Journal
      They wouldn't even have to go that far. Just explaining to them how much possible money you could be losing in free advertising is enough.

      When people link to their site it's advertising. Yes it's a double edge sword to allow linking but regardless it's getting the orbitz site some publicity whether good or bad.

      By not allowing links to your site in any form, their basicially relying on their Thunderbirds puppets and that gay sounding guy playing hide and seek to promote their site.

      Word of mouth is the strongest form of advertising a company can have. Period. One person satisified/dissatified with your service will tell anyone interested in their product their experience. By not allowing people to post in their blogs or their site or even e-mail for that matter, your basicially cutting a large portion of free advertising you could be using to promote your business.
  • by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:37AM (#11666707)
    By reading this comment, you agree that you will not link to this comment or any of its child comments. You also agree to mod it up, using any and all mod points that you currently have.

    By reading the terms and conditions of this comment, you are locked in to obeying them by the most basic laws of physics of the universe and failure to obey them will cause you and your entire family to instantly cease to exist.
    • by cHiphead ( 17854 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:47AM (#11666779)
      You also agree to mod it up, using any and all mod points that you currently have.


      Holy crap, it worked.
    • by Myriad ( 89793 ) <myriad@thebs o d . com> on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:48AM (#11666786) Homepage
      By reading the terms and conditions of this comment, you are locked in to obeying them by the most basic laws of physics of the universe and failure to obey them will cause you and your entire family to instantly cease to exist.

      Man, your lawyer must have friends in very high places if he can issue a Cease to Exist notice!

      How is such a thing delivered? Does the Reaper come in person?


      Blockwars [blockwars.com]: Free, multiplayer, Tetris like game.

    • by Grym ( 725290 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @10:42AM (#11667285)

      I know this is funny and all, but is this what our world is coming to? Is it going to be someday that imprinted on your hamburger patty is an EULA that absolves the fast food companies of any obligation to your health?

      Why is it that the courts are more worried about enforcing the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law? Wasn't that the whole point of English Common law to begin with? To make the law accessible to the people? If people are entering into contracts and agreements simply by visiting websites, listening to ads on TV/radio, and even going to public parks [slashdot.org] how can they realistically know every facet of every agreement? That is to say that if I actually took the time to read all the small print on every ad I see, all the EULAs on software I've already bought, and check to make sure that every time I take a picture I'm not violating someone's copyright, I wouldn't get anything done.

      Moreover, don't contracts/agreements hinge upon the idea of benefiting both parties in some way? What possible benefit are people gaining from being restricted by rules they neither know nor understand?

      -Grym

    • By reading the terms and conditions of this comment, you are locked in to obeying them by the most basic laws of physics of the universe and failure to obey them will cause you and your entire family to instantly cease to exist.

      Could I modify that to ...your current manager to instantly cease to exist ?

      If you find this amendment to your T and C's ameniable please provide the deepest spot on your comment to link to.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    If you don't like their terms, don't use their service.

    This has nothing to do with "rights".
    • Ahh, until their webmonkeys forget to put out the robots.txt file, Google (or other) crawls them, and then they get sued for breaching their TOS. Whether they'd win or not isn't the issue; it's still pretty damn expensive to defend yourself from lawsuits. Sure, Google brings in mad cash, but I'm sure they'd much rather spend that on free soda for their employees than epic teams of lawyers.
  • by millwall ( 622730 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:39AM (#11666714)
    Ok, so if you post a dupe of story it could be serious. No dupe postings of this story after March 12th :)
  • by afidel ( 530433 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:40AM (#11666722)
    A legal/contractual agreement which is established by a click through agreement is unlikely to be enforcable, and even if it were, HOW are they going to enforce it? Are they going to sue you for linking to them? If the sued party got an even semi-competent judge and council it wouldn't be much of an issue, if you put a site on the public internet, and don't take proper technical measures to insure that people don't take actions you don't want them to then your site is pretty much fair game. It's extremely easy to insure that people don't go to a part of your site that you don't want them to, porn operators have been doing it for the better part of a decade now, so scrap the stupid unenforcable EULA crap and have your web monkies earn their salaries!
  • by soundman32 ( 147936 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:40AM (#11666724) Homepage
    Can't their web server just reject or redirect any page requests that don't have a referrer field of their own web site?

    • by DoraLives ( 622001 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:52AM (#11666818)
      Can't their web server just reject or redirect any page requests that don't have a referrer field of their own web site?

      Of course they can. But how in hell will they ever see another new customer via the internet again?

      Too funny.

      • Well they'll obviously allow "shallow links" from other sites, and unless they have their server set up absolutely ridiculously, it should be easy for the server to recognize a URL that's considered "deep" from one that isn't.
      • Can't their web server just reject or redirect any page requests that don't have a referrer field of their own web site?

        Of course they can. But how in hell will they ever see another new customer via the internet again?

        Not to put words in the grandparent's mouth, but I think 'or redirect' might just mean that if you want to connect to orbitz.com/very/deep/link from outside of orbitz.com, you get something else, like the orbitz.com front page instead.

        It's not really difficult to go beyond this simple

    • As another poster implied, they don't want to block their affiliates. Of course, they could just set up their affiliates URIs to be an allowed referrer, but that would probably be too much trouble for them to keep track of who has their hands in what.
  • by slashjames ( 789070 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:41AM (#11666731)
    By removing all links to Orbitz from other domains, watch them fall in search engine rankings. Orbitz fails to realize they only are high in the search results because other sites link to them. Their current policy indicates they don't want to even show up!
  • by Andy_R ( 114137 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:44AM (#11666752) Homepage Journal
    I'm breaking section 6 of your stupid and unenforceable rules [orbitz.com] by not getting a 'separate linking agreement' with you before posting that link, and I'm not going to edit this post if you ask me to, becasue slashdot doesn't let anyone edit posts.

    I challenge you to try and enforce your new terms and conditions, or drop them.
  • by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <petedaly@ixBLUE.netcom.com minus berry> on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:45AM (#11666761)
    Generally I think their idea may be good, but maybe taken too far and/or poorly executed.

    Here's why:
    Orbitz is a travel site for purchasing tickets, etc. The price and availability of these things changes constantly. Additionally, I would bet they may run into customer service problems if too many people are all trying to view and/or book the same flights at the same time. The system is really designed to be a point in time quote system. The problem comes when someone does a deep link, to a quote for example. Chances are if a link is posted on the web (or sent through email), the page the new visitor sees may be different from the page/price/availability the creator of the link saw.

    That all being said, there are technical means to reduce, if not eliminate this problem. Could be they are implementing a technical solution, and are putting this in the TOS so they have something to point to when deep links suddenly stop working and customers complain.

    PR wise they could have done this better, but I bet they never thought a place like this would publicize a TOS change.

    On the other hand, I could be all wrong about their motives. :-)

    -Pete
  • If they don't want links, don't link to them. I don't see how anybody is hurt by this except them.
  • reading != agreement (Score:3, Interesting)

    by retards ( 320893 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:46AM (#11666764) Journal
    Just by reading an EULA doesn't mean you agree to it.

    Maybe, _maybe_, if you click 'I agree' you are bound to some parts.

    Anyway, if they want to be a little island in cyberspace, then fine by me. If they really want to protect their IP they can pull out the ethernet cable from their webserver's NIC.
  • by Deanasc ( 201050 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:48AM (#11666783) Homepage Journal
    Clearly showing a fundimental misunderstanding about how the internet works should be a huge warning flag that management doesn't understand the world they're working in.

    Why would anyone need to deep link to a gum that keeps your teeth clean anyway?

  • GameFAQs [gamefaqs.com] has something similar to this already in place, you're not supposed to link directly to an FAQ [gamefaqs.com], you have to instead link to the page with the FAQ listed on it [gamefaqs.com]. They claim [gamefaqs.com] to have link-blocking countermeasures in place to prevent exactly what I just did above from working (though I didn't find them to be effective when I tried them just now, you may disagree). Then there are infinite [tripod.com] sites [geocities.com] which disallow remote hotlinking to their images.

    Anyway my point is that it's foolish to assume people will o

    • When I follow the direct link you posted in Firefox I get the follwoing page:-

      Referer Link Error

      On every single HTML page of GameFAQs is the following request:
      Feel free to link to this page, but not directly to the FAQs..

      You're seeing this error message because it appears that you're linking from an external site directly to one of the text files stored at GameFAQs. GameFAQs is not a free public file server. Bandwidth costs money, and when sites link directly to files stored on the site, it becomes both
      • Thank you for that: see, it does work!

        (Aside: I don't know why I was able to link straight through. Probably because I'd already visited the FAQ moments earlier.)

  • by DingerX ( 847589 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:51AM (#11666810) Journal
    Dunno folks. It'd be interesting to see who they go after. I read that thing, and I wasn't thinking of Joe Sixpack linking to orbitz.com with a ilttle orbitz logo banner, but rather of someone ripping off their C/C page, with all the other links intact.
    But heck, maybe that doesn't make any sense either.

    Another possibility is someone slapping together a meta-airline search engine, that runs its own army of accounts and automatically sends requests to Orbitz, Travelocity, Expeida, Opopo (or whatever it is) at once, then returns the data
    hey, you know, that sounds like a prtty good Firefox plugin...
  • Google (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Steamhead ( 714353 )
    http://www.google.com/search?q=link:+http://www.or bitz.com/&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 [google.com]

    I smell 46,600 lawsuits coming...

    But seriously, this isn't even logical let alone enforceable, it will fail.
  • W3C say ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:55AM (#11666838)
    any attempt to forbid the practice of deep linking is based on a misunderstanding of the technology, and threatens to undermine the functioning of the Web as a whole

    -- http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/deeplinking [w3.org]

  • by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:58AM (#11666857) Homepage

    We wouldn't have much of this problem if browsers didn't send the HTTP "Referer" header that gave away the URL that linked to them. So I say let's cut this header out. They don't need to be tracking where we have visited before, anyway. And besides, that header name is misspelled.

    And while you're at it, cut out the HTTP "User-Agent" header. With web standards, there's no longer any need for this, either. That will stop the practice of favoring certain browsers.

  • It's just plain etikul bidzness.

    You write whatever you want on a sheet of paper, pass it for a contract, and hope that suckers will fall for it.

  • 404 handlers, redirectors, simple scripts to handle referals you'd like to see land in a different spot... these are all child's play. The billed man-hours of lawyer time that this has already (and WILL) cost them must eclipse (by orders of magnitude) what a technical solution would have cost. They'll deserve all of the traffic they lose because of this, and serves them right. Let the web foot-traffic market show them the foolishness of this approach. This is not exactly proactively leveraging networked syn
  • by EmagGeek ( 574360 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @10:00AM (#11666881) Journal
    I use Orbitz [orbitz.com] all the time, and I have generally had good experiences with them. [orbitz.com] In fact, I used them [orbitz.com] the other day to book a trip [orbitz.com] to Phoenix. It's too bad these new terms [orbitz.com] are so restrictive.
    • by mithras the prophet ( 579978 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @10:06AM (#11666921) Homepage Journal
      I just sent them this email:
      To: customerservice@orbitz.com
      From: <me>
      Subject: request
      Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 09:02:46 -0500

      Hello,

      I am an Orbitz member. I would like to include a link to the Orbitz
      homepage in a text email to two members of my family. Per the new
      Orbitz Terms & Conditions, I hereby request permission to include such
      a link in an email to be sent March 12, 2005.

      If possible I would also like to secure a standing agreement permitting
      me to include text links to the Orbitz homepage in future emails,
      including but not limited to two such emails I intend to send in the
      month of April.

      Finally, because some of my friends and family are not yet Orbitz
      members, I request a "separate linking agreement" between Orbitz and my
      fucking email outbox, so that I may direct such persons to the Orbitz
      registration page at:
      https://www.orbitz.com/Secure/ViewNewMemberRe g?
      z=e57r&r=d&signInType=explicit

      Thank you for your attention.
      Sincerely,
      Me
  • I just now visited their website for the first time since it was no longer a website for some failed carbonated beverage [lanceandeskimo.com], and this is what firefox told me:

    Firefox prevented this site from opening 2 popup windows. Click here for options...

    It's bad enough that websites have popups at all, but what stupid web developer thinks it's a good idea to pop up TWO windows with one visit???

  • "Don't Link to Us!" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by geegs ( 744247 ) * on Monday February 14, 2005 @10:02AM (#11666891)

    Although no longer updated, David E Sorkin's Don't Link to Us! [dontlink.com] page is still relevant.

    A page like that could be useful for shaming companies into improving their linking policies.

  • by clickster ( 669168 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @10:57AM (#11667449)
    What is the difference between deep linking and quoting someone else's written work in your own? As long as they get credited, you can do it. I understand that there are advertisements on Orbitz's website and that they need people to see them so that they can make money, but come on.

    If that is their argument, then I pose the following:
    Could I publish a book that had ad space in it and then disallow references to it? (I'm not asking if this is legally feasible, since there is more than enough legal history to strike down any such attempt. I am simply asking if that would be a valid comparison.
  • So what (Score:5, Insightful)

    by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @11:13AM (#11667625)
    What happens if you violate the terms and conditions by deep linking into their site? They terminate your account and you can't give your money to them? OH well. Problem self-solved.
  • wrong technology (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EXTmilky ( 771402 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @11:15AM (#11667643) Homepage
    If they don't want to get linked at all, they should switch from HTML to PDF or publish all pages in a single MSWord document. That's it.

    The WWW was designed to allow for links from one document to the other. It is neither possible nor netiquette to prohibite that. Dumb bitches.
  • 404's... (Score:5, Funny)

    by AyeRoxor! ( 471669 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @11:32AM (#11667819) Journal
    I've always wondered if 404's count as a deep link.

    Look at me orbitz!!!

    http://www.orbitz.com/global/I'm%20deep%20linking! [orbitz.com]

    I'll expect my summons in the mail.

  • by SpaghettiPattern ( 609814 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @12:00PM (#11668127)
    I know of a case [www.ivir.nl] from the Netherlands where newspaper editors wanted to prohibit deep linking to their sites. The judge did not honor the request.

    IMHO you can link to whatever you want on the Internet. There are enough ways to prevent your content being accessed by unauthorized people. The content provider is the only one responsible for its authorization management.
  • ita software built the fastest fare search engine [itasoftware.com] in the world and leases it out to comanies like Oribtz. If you don't have a specific business deal with Orbitz, you can get your optimized fare straight from ITA and just go to website of of the airline they turn up for you to book the flight directly with the carrier...same prices, same seats, wicked fast.
  • PageRank (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @05:25PM (#11671909)
    The Google Anti-Bomb: oblige them, and watch their Google PageRank go to zero.
  • Flash (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sr180 ( 700526 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @07:20PM (#11673018) Journal
    Why dont they just make it a Macromedia Flash based website. No legal issues required, no linking is possible, just a site that blows.

If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro

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