Slashdot Mirror
Judge Rules Deep Hyperlinking OK
SEWilco writes "In this USA Today story a judge ruled that hyperlinking is not illegal as long as consumers understand whose site they are on and that one company has not simply duplicated another's page. " The case stems from Ticketmaster suing Tickets.com for deep-linking within Ticketmaster. Very good ruling for the health of the Web.
The company I work for made it onto my favorite site! (Tickets.com that is..).. Been here 3 years, and still going..Maybe the stock will finally go up???
You benefit from a system, then you get caught, then you say you want to change the system.
Yep, throw in a monotonic voice and a few Open Source nuclear secrets now pointing at the US and you'd be a perfect Al Gore fill clone.
Or use URLs that have wacky characters in them that change
t ml
http://wherever.com/s7dhf67sdfjkdf76/dir/page.h
I think the scenerio you describe is very different from deep Hyperlinking. A better analogy would be to have links on your web page which point to a discussion topic on the slashdot.org server. This link to slashdot.org's HTML document would include slashdot's advertisements. I see this practice as totally different from duplicating slashdot's content in your own web space.
ummmm.... if someone buys of the ticketmaster site, doesn't ticketmaster make money??? what is their problem?
--
J Perry Fecteau, 5-time Mr. Internet
Ejercisio Perfecto: from Geek to GOD in WEEKS!
--
And Justice for None
of course there's a great big can of worms when it comes to works that pass into the public domain...
locking everything up on one site is not a great recipie for the public interest, imho
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I guess it would be a good idea to show my credentials by reminiscing at length about telnetting into CERN to use the NeXT web browser, back in '90-something. Why, there were only four sites on the web back then...
No? Well, anyway, I do understand what hyperlinking is. The issue here is DEEP hyperlinking -- taking advantage of a site's back end data or services without showing users the rest of the site. I would have thought that commercial site designers might consider that obnoxious, if not illegal, and I was curious if that's so.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Keep on moderating this comment up so the stupid Slashdotters don't continue to think Ticketmaster was trying to ban hyperlinks.
They're trying to stop FRAUD, MISREPRESENTATION, and THEFT OF CONTENT. I'm sure Hemos (and Andover) would have a different view of the matter of I made a little frameset with my banner ad and logo in the top frame and Slashdot in the bottom.
This is a case of one site taking credit for the hard work of another, and it's WRONG.
--
#19845
What we need to do is set up a briefing packet for Congress. All of them. Discussions of the flaws in the DMCA, of UCITA, of the attacks on DeCSS and on anti-filtering. Logical, reasoned arguments against what's there already. Maybe sponsored by the EFF. Or a made-up think-tank with a grandiose title.
This falls under the "geeks just don't understand how to hack politics" thing, doesn't it? I think this is a great idea. Does anyone from the EFF read this? I wonder if they'd be interested. Does EFF even have a regular lobbying arm? Gotta go check on their web site...
--
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
Swampfox
Real Hacker (tm) Wanna-be
Deals
About half of slashdot is now about patents, laws, law suits, and censorhip.
Time for a new section?
How about "Slime" as the name of it?
And of course we all know that Ticketmasters of the Universe need all that ad revenue 'cause they don't really make any money off of ticket sales. : )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Shouldn't you at least have the decency to credit Lewis Carroll, the author of that poem?
Yes, I know that Lewis Carroll was his pen name, not his real name.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
> If you cant do business here on the pre
> established ground rules, then dont do busines
> here
HUH? Since when are there pre-established ground rules for hyperlinking on the Internet? Establishing rules is the whole point of this case.
> Do your reserch, then do some more research,
> then start working on your idea, then do a
> little more research.
I couldn't agree more. Did you do YOUR research?
Ticketmaster is not using your internet for their own ends. They *DID* help create a global communication system--they pay for their colocated connections just like nearly every other commercial online venture. They should be able to do as they please with their own site.
How much did YOU contribute to a backbone provider last year?
If that is realy why Ticketmaster went to courts with the case, then I don't understand why Ticketmaster didn't simply use the "Referer" tag in the HTTP request.
In the early days Altavista was just "altavista.digital.com", then someone registered altavista.com, copied the search form from Digital, put his own advertisments on that page and let Digital do all the hard work (i.e. searching).
Digital, having a clue, used the "Referer" tag in the requests to notify the people coming from altavista.com, in big bold friendly letters, that the page they came from was in fact, not associated with Digital. The "issue" was solved in under 1/2 month from start to end.
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
EXACTLY! (Well, skipping the goat sex and child porn part :P) This has always seemed like such a DUH issue to me because it's a simple configuration for the webservers. The courts should not be dragged into situations where decent administration is the solution.
Quite simply:
Don't solve a technical problem by filing a suit.
It's not worse than looking at the HTTP_REFERER anyway...
---
touch, unzip, play, finger, yes, mount, fsck, fsck, fsck, fsck, gasp, done, unmount, sleep
0 1 - just my two bits
Ticketmaster allows their partner sites to link to anything within their site. People who have made a business contract with Ticketmaster would probably not appreciate having their users forced to log in to Ticketmaster or sit and look at a splash page.
If you allow some people to link to pages other than your front page (they do, for their partnerships) this won't work. And you want a user to be able to bookmark a concert and come back to it.
Actually, it's very difficult to solve this problem with technology. Things like User-agent, Referer, and other HTTP headers are trivial to forge, which leaves you with blocking specific IPs. If the offending site is using frames, then it becomes impossible to tell "real" traffic from the tickets.com links. If you don't allow any legitimate customers to frame your site, you can use frame-busting javascript, but the ticketmaster.com site uses frames.
So, there is no simple technical solution.
Bzzzt WRONG.
I can at least....
> On another note, Hey Rob, what's with the Extrans option? It does the exact same thing as "plain text" now... it used to work..
While what you bring up is a point that probably deserves to be brought up, it's possible that putting it at the end of an anonymous coward post nested three levels deep in a very busy discussion is probably not the most effective word to get yourself heard. Especially not by any member of the slashdot staff.. they don't read _every_ post, and probably won't read yours.
Just a bit of advice.
[personally i've never seen "extrans" work, although it would be really cool if it did.]
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Actually it is good, and reasonable. Take it back into older areas for a moment. If deep linking were not legal, then it would be illegal for me to refer to you a particular page in a reference book, allowing you to skip over everything else the authors put into the book. The authors could legally restrict deep linking into their book, forcing me to tell you only the title and making you search for the relevant information on your own using what they provided.
Remember the other half of the judge's decision: that it must be clear who owns the content you're deep-linking to. It would still, under this decision, be illegal for tickets.com to link to Ticketmaster information and present it as their own. And if they clearly identify it as Ticketmaster information, what you complain about goes away.
using university pages for profit? After all,
isn't research done at universities non-profit
in general. Thus, maybe they want to keep
pages from the university non-profit as well?
George Lee
I see Ticketmaster.com as just a bunch of incompetent whiners. Why? Because they obviously have no clues (at least among those in the company that management actually listens to) about how to make deep hyperlinking useless. Apparently the management of Ticketmaster.com is so out of touch with technology that they were the ones to lump data mining and deep linking together. If I had a data repository of great value and wanted to make sure anyone visited was greeted first by whatever license agreements I wanted them to OK, or whatever ads I wanted to spam them with, it would be easy. And unlike some places which dumbly redirect offsite links to the main page, I could subsequently lead the visitor to the exact page they went for after they agree (and the page can have ads on it just for offsite linking, too). Manipulating how servers deliver content is so utterly easy that I can't see how Tickermaster.com can be anything but incompetent.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Then do what I do ... don't use XML.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
kar4@psu.edu to ask for permission to link to their pages.
This gets you to
Karen Rugh, director
Department of University Relations
312 Old Main
865-2501
Geach
It's a good thing deep hyperlinking is legal. Rob would not do well in the joint.
-ODBjr
Basically, less work for lawyers trying to stop linking through the courts and more work for web designers who actually use the technology.
To me having people link into select portions of another site seems goofy. Often one individual will put together a webpage that includes several frames of html, images, etc. I would expect that as the author of said page I should have a certain amount of control of how my copyrighted material was presented and not have to make sure that every image, every hunk of html, every script included a notice of how to get to the real page.
But being who I am I wouldn't make it so that you can't get the page. Instead I would make the page say something terribly damaging to the linker and ensure that the only way to generate that page is to enter my site in a manner I didn't intend. Thus if I was JoeBusiness-dot-com and FredBusiness-dot-com linked to me, then I would put up a page that says "FredBusiness-dot-com sells substandard product/whatever."
Then there's the issue of bandwidth consumtion, etc. If someone is gaining from content on my site and it costs me money for them to do so, I think I would certainly make sure that their business was damaged somehow.
Finally, like I said above it's a technical problem not a legal problem.
Or you could just look for accesses from a certain domain/site/whatever and provide a different page. Once you've identified the problem there are easy solutions to prevent wankers from abusing you via technical trickery.
I think you would then probably be interested to the wonderful world of slander litigation if you didn't have any proof to back up your claim.
It's all in how you phrase it.
Some problems are certainly issues of how much effort is put into security on the part of the admin. But it's not reasonable to expect every sysadmin to be a leet x86 hacker who spends 23 3/4 hours a day disassembling their OS and assorted applications. I think there is a slight problem in the security industry where different companies are competing to show how proficient they are and thus want to be "first to market" with the new exploits. Which creates a bit of a problem. Rather than trying to force a vendors hand to fix the particular exploit they discovered by going public with an exploit and extensive documentation they should really analyze if it's necessary that there be a fix out yesterday. Sometimes an exploit is the result of an oversight, sometimes it requires a PhD in seven different specialized fields to discover. If it's of the latter variety, I think that prudence is more intelligent than being first.
I pretty much completely disagree with your second paragraph entirely. It appears to be mainly advocacy. Sure there are problems with MS' stuff. But is there any more than you find in any other vendor that provides the same feature set and the same ability to shoot yourself in the foot? Do you blame Redhat for problems with Apache? Or more specifically problems with lpd? If someone doesn't have bullet proof glass in their car windows does that mean it's OK to shoot them down? If you aren't wearing the "bear suit" does that mean it's ok to beat the snot out of you with a bat? There are proper ways to deal with issues like this and none of them are of the pie in the face variety. And if the pie your choose to throw happens to be laced with arsnic, well you've screwed yourself.
It might be > 25. I was at 29 yesterday and had +1 available to me. If you rant at +1 you'll lose it unless you are way up there.
When I click on a link my browser (unless I tell it not to; iCab lets you pick) sends the REFERER info as part of the HTTP request. How does the site I last accessed forge the referer tag; some sort of skanky javascript or something?
The trouble with Ticketmaster is that tickets sometimes go on sale earlier through them than you could get 'em at the box office (and I'm getting the best seats I can, dagnabbit).
You better watch that link, if not you might get in trouble.
I'd sure like to link to my friends page but I wouldn't want to break any rules.
Lame.
I think that the point is that they *ask* you not to link. Which I think is a perfectly valid request. They at least aren't trying to make it illegal to do so. This is well within most peoples idea of good netiquette. And I'd bet that most people comply with this reasonable request. That's one of the great things about the net [or used to be, it's fading fast]. People respected others wishes and everything was for the free flow if info.
And I think it's even ok if they want to be a little more forceful with it. I wouldn't mind at all if Iliad &co. made it so that you had to view the static page to see the comic [as long as they don't go overboard and require registration or make it so you have to view 10 pages of adds to get to the strip]
Ender
Nothing to see here
Hyperlinking is the very essence of the web -- companies putting up web sites should be aware of this. If they're not, and they're so without a clue that they'd sue over it, their sites should be taken down and their domain names relinquished; they have no business here.
How about if we make them refund all the money they took from their customers, close all their online stores, shoot the managers, and declare bankruptcy. Then would you be happy?
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
In the non-web world, many businesses profit on the backs of others. Consider phone books. The phone company is MAKING A PROFIT by listing your phone number!
Yes, this is true. But that is because THEY are doing the collection and aggregation of phone number data. Tickets.com isn't even doing that much - they are letting someone else collect and aggregate the data, then profiting from their alternate presentation of it.
Your analogy is wrong - tickets.com using Ticketmaster data to populate its site is not like being a phone book; the correct analogy would be that tickets.com is like one company publishing a phone book by reproducing all of the entries in a competitor's phone book.
Is this decision really very good for the Internet? I don't think so. All this will do will encourage Ticketmaster to take its listings offline and make Internet ticket sales non-existent.
Ticketmaster spends a lot of money to convince venues that they should be their ticketing vendor. They go to further expense to aggregate all that data and present it pleasantly on the web. This makes it much easier for me, the consumer, to buy tickets for concerts from home rather than waiting in line outside a record store all night (which I've done) or trying to get through on the phones, only to have a show sold out by the time the busy signals dissipate (which I've also done).
By saying that tickets.com has the right to link to that data and present it as its own and essentially profit from the labor of others (and if you think that statement is incorrect, then look at tickets.com; they *COULD NOT EXIST* without leeching off of Ticketmaster) will be a disincentive for Ticketmaster to do business on the web. And if this trend of providing legal protection to companies who simply copy others' sites and reformat them continues, many other companies will be discouraged from doing business on the web too, further restricting my ability to do whatever I damn well please on the Internet.
This decision is *NOT* good for anyone who actually wants to 'do more' on the Internet.
Okay...
So the established nature, the basic idea behind the world wide web, is to allow any link to any resource.
So: will whoever it was who came up with the novel idea of forbidding "deep links" into their website, and implemented the software technology to do so, hurry up and patent it?
Please?
This is not the first time that Ticketmaster has sued someone for deep linking. But the simple solution, rather than a lawsuit, would be to make it a "closed site". You could restrict access to internal web pages to people that haven't logged on, much the way that the NY Times does it. You never see /. link directly to a story on their site, and it's not because they were sued.
This whole lawsuit has seemed very silly to me, as there are simple technical solutions that could be put in place to solve the problem. Ticket master has been working hard to change the way the web works, and not in a good way.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
Actually, in my first draft, the sentence ended, "... (except maybe Al Gore)." (No kidding. :)
I took it out because I thought it was needlessly inflammatory. Besides, maybe if we ignore those people, they'll go away. (I wish...)
Happy Premise #3: Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.
Ticketmaster is NOT a monopoly. I buy my tickets by going to the place that the event is held at and saving around $8 per ticket because they don't have those fees. I think you can usually even call the stadium/arena/theater and do it over the phone and give your credit card #. A LOT easier than dealing with ticketmaster. If you go on the day of the show at the place, you can usually get a better seat than if you go to ticketmaster and buy a ticket (around the same time, not like as soon as the ticket sales open). The local #'s for ticketmaster are about impossible to go through, and if you aren't interested in purchasing a ticket, but rather want customer support, you have to manage to get through the number, hold for 20 minutes, ask to be transferred to customer service, then hold for another 20 mins.
But I digress... no, ticketmaster is NOT a monopoly.
I believe it's 20...
Yeah, maybe it's just so the ticket booth doesn't get long lines. They still make the same amount of money whether the ticket is sold through ticketmaster or through the event location. Who knows... my point is you can buy the SAME EXACT ticket through other outlets, you don't HAVE to buy it through Ticketmaster. You're paying for the convenience of not having to go the location and having a lot of events to choose from.
Microsoft is a whole nother ballpark. An analogy between ticketmaster and microsoft just doesn't fly.
Finger, mount, fsck, fsck, fsck, unmount, done.
;-p
Or something like that.
Here's my copy of DeCSS. Where's yours?
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
LOL!
Funny post and funny sig.
This doesn't surpise me. This is the same School that puts all of it's student's personal info up for anyone to see (by fingering their e-mail address). If you want you info taken down you have to jump through a few dozen hoops.
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
stupid + stupid = more stupid.
Is there a new saying out there?
"If you dont like a site, DDoS it."
So how does this decision affect (if at all) things such as web-comics where, due to pressure from sponsers, they usually ask that you not link directly to their image (i.e. userfriendly)?
-----------
#!/usr/bin/perl -sp0777iX+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
--Ks9
Those companies need to stop whining and learn a little javascript to force the frameset so they can have their wittle-bitty logo and adverts. Would've been interesting to see the court case, all those lawyers and judges pretending to talk tech with expressions like "deep hyperlinking". heh.
Powerbook G4/1.5GHz 12", Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1554
Actually, i know this guy. He didn't do anything by thoughtfull posting. He's a karma whore. He's admitted it quite often on irc infact. He also he was a kick ass speller in high school so i think the misspelling is a joke. You know, maybe if people at slashdot didn't take them selves so seriously, stuff like this wouldn't happen. I mean, what's really so bad about trying to get a first post.
"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra
FYI, your link doesn't work externally, it gives "you do not have permission to view that page".
... is that wrong? :)
Here's a copy of the policy that is available for external viewing: Policy AD52 LINKS TO OR FROM PENN STATE WEB PAGES
For some reason, I just LOVE making an external link to that PENN state policy
yeah, that AC was a moron... but maybe he accidentally made a decent point: if enough people follow hard links to their policy page, they might realize that they are getting a bad rep for insanely stupid policies.
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Are you kidding? Deep linking is used more than 1-click purchasing, and law was important there, was it not? Law stories may be boring to read, but they are very important. Issues like these effect how you work the internet, even how some 12 year old kid designs his geocities shrine to Tina Turna. It would be cool if nobody really cared and there were no lawsuits like this, but wouldn't you like to hear it here first if suddendly you could be fined a few grand for linking to a picture of your favorite name brand ice cream?
www.wsj.com for example. Pay your monthly charge and read the news.
If you were to build a free gateway to wsj.com, handily passing your own username and password in the URL, thereby giving everybody else a free ride, THAT would get you in trouble ...
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
And I'm sure it would have cost a lot less to develop such a system than the legal costs of going after the deep linkers did.
Dear STEPHEN J. MacCARTHY,
In your ridiculously titled role of executive director for university relations at Penn State University, would you deign to allow me to post a link on the Slashdot.org news forum to PSU's homepage at http://www.psu.edu. Pkease note that my posting on the forum will only be available to the world for a few weeks, and only within easy access for the next day or so. Also please be aware that I am not the owner or operator of the site "slashdot.org", and the your link would meerly appear as a comment in the open forums. As such it is owned by me, though given my inclinations to free speech, I would grant everyone free, accredited, rights to reproduce it.
yours etc.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
Now I can no longer do that.
Yay, go U.S. Court system!
Now it's Jackson's turn.
Jackson Jackson he's our man...
Sorry to have offended 'Mr. Geocities'....
My site doesn't have any purpose. I don't have a site. What the heck are you referring to? I sell drugs for a living.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I've noticed this come up a lot regarding stuff like celebrity picture pages, arcade ROM archives, etc. People who have gone to the trouble to build a lot of content on their site don't like to have their site hijacked by some jackass with a geocities page and a bunch of links directly to the content.
/~seth/roms
Here's a simple mechanism that will fix said jackass's little red wagon- change the path for all the content on a regular basis. You can set a script up to do this via chron job every evening. Here's an example:
Say the ROM files are all located in the following directory:
So a link in my own web page to a ROM would look like:
http://mac6100.dhs.org/~seth/roms/gladiator.zip
On a nightly basis I could change the name of the roms directory to something else like roms3.30.99 and then have a script do a regsub on all my html files to replace 'roms' with 'roms3.30.99' in every link. This would require mr. geocities hijacker to hand-edit his page on a nightly basis. Which is probably more overhead than he's willing to support since s/he's already demonstrated a tendency of not wanting to put real work into developing a site.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I feel fortunate that a decision like this has been made. Now if only we can pull everyone else in and change people's sorry patent/copyright attitudes.
"Being alive is a crock of shit." --Kilgore Trout
tell it brother!
Finally something has gone our way! Woo hoo!
Deep linking (where appropriate) is far better than dumping visitors to your site off on the front page / outer shell / whatever of another site in the hopes that they find their own way(s) in to related content.
Appropriate hyperlinking permits one to jump to a particular / [well-]defined resource -- if, as a designer, I think that reference to an external resource fits within the context of my own site, you had better believe that I want to target specific content and not just external sites as wholes .
Intel Inside
.oO0Oo.
Brown out
Log
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
perhaps my house is deemed to be educational
.oO0Oo.
if not then it should be, baby!
growl
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That's an interesting thought, actually. Lets break it down:
1) Refunding money: Why not? They overcharge anyways.
2) Close online stores: Why should they be allowed to operate online if thye act the way they do in the first place?
3) Shoot the managers: It was probably their idea to sue in the first place. I say we go with your idea, in the spirit of Darwinism.
4) Declare bankruptcy: I'm sure they're making way too much money as it is off of their bloated ticket prices that this step is unnecessary.
--
--
Actually a friend of mine runs a site and found that another site was using a image, which they had simply linked too on my friends site. My friends solution was simple. He changed his site to point at the image somewhere else and dropped an ad for his site in place. For 24 hours the site which was bleeding his bandwidth displayed an ad for my friends site. In the end bandwidth costs money. Its one thing to have a link which loads a page, its completely different to use someones image. I dont think it should be illegal but you get what you pay for. In this case justice was served. To date I have seen no reason the courts or the lawyers need to be on the Internet. We can police ourselves easy enough.
Really the question is this. What the hell is deep linking. Is it the ability to link to some page not at the root of another site or is it the ability to tag some individual resource like a gif? If i were operating a ticket site and tickets.com linked to a page on my site since they didnt have it available and I got my banner impression I'd be happy about that. On the flip side if they are linking to a gif on my site trying to sell tickets to the same event and using my pictures and bandwidth Id be pissed. This of course assumes that I have a ticket site or even care about about ticket sites which I dont. Bandwidth costs money. When you link to a site that has a 50 meg demo on it may not seem like a big deal but that company is shelling our for the cost of the transfer. I think personally its only fair to link to there download page so they can at least show a banner ad once to make up for that cost.
a voice of reason among a herd of ignornace... tanks :)
Even better, every time a link is clicked there is an HTTP Refrer(sp). Its trivial code and I have implmented it before to stop EXACTLY that. I did it in about 20 minutes for an entire site. Its PURE BS that this ever made it to court. It shows a definate lack of technology knowledge amoung the united states judicial system, and among the people trying to represent this as a valid lawsuit.
Jeremy
Make sure you are coming from a university site too. Note that the difference between the two links that makes it work is the addition of a "www" before "guru".
That's strange, I see no difference in the site when I look at it through my isp or university. But then again, I guess ".ac.uk" isn't a university is it?
Musn't grumble...
then you are not simply hyperlinking, you are COPYING copyrighted data
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
now if only cookie.ticketmaster.com wasn't patented, ticketmaster could use that to check that the user had already logged on :)
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
The ideal solution is not to simply turn away all customers linked from outside, but rather to spawn a new window with your whole page, and whatever frame setup you may have, so that people know they're buying from you instead of someone else. Basically, you set up a top frame to put your advertising and "Welcome to Ticketmaster" signs, and then whenever you receive an http request for any other page on your site, simply serve up that frame with a reference to your content below it. I know there are sites that do this. You could tweak it so that the initial service of the top frame would spawn itself in a new window. This I have also seen done. These don't seem to be terribly complex systems to put into place. Keep in mind that these sites probably handle huge amounts of dynamic content, so this would hardly add strain. It sure seems simple to me.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
"'If we spend substantial money to build up a site, why should they be able to take that and build their business on the backs of our hard work?' Ticketmaster attorney Robert Platt argued." That's so nifty. They say point blank that the way the legal system should work is that the highest bidder wins. I guess they're going to try and reinstate the complaint because they feel they didn't get their money's worth.
I'm a Penn State student, but I've never seen any enforcement to this policy. And the Link you posted cannot be viewed from a non psu.edu account :-) (probably why you pasted it)
But anyways, Aren't Universities required to have a similar policy so their services can't be used under any commercial enviorment?
------- What exactly is real?
I think you would then probably be interested to the wonderful world of slander litigation if you didn't have any proof to back up your claim.
Did anybody else notice the irony in this quote from the article?
Links to competitors' Web pages have proven to be a service that boosts the traffic to smaller Internet companies, but the links often lead directly to a page deep within the rival site.
If TicketMaster makes their money off of banner ads, what the hell is the $19.50/ticket "Service Charge" for?
Then, after they've effictively doubled the price of the ticket by adding the service charge they ask me if I want to $13/year to subscribe to their magazine that will tell me what concerts are coming up (or more likely what concerts I just missed because the magazine came late).
I can get that for free instantly from www.pollstar.com!
_________________________________________
I've even had some Shmoe link to my "Get Netscape Now!" button. In that case he was too lazy to copy the image to his own server (or at least hotlink to Netscape!) Well because this site owner was really lazy he didn't bother using Height & Width attributes for the image. This allowed me to create a banner ad that now appears on his site much larger than the original button did! If someone's going to steal my bandwidth I'm going to get some free advertising out of it!
Pain in the ass, yes. But it must be done to protect my own site. I certainly don't mind someone linking to my site, hell it even helps raise your score on search engines! What I do mind is that they link directly to my images without giving any credit.
I have since changed the .htaccess file to disallow hotlinking from ebay sites.
_________________________________________
Don't get super happy about this ruling quite yet, Ticketmaster is re-filing. The judge dropped their current case, but gave them direction for what he would accept, and allow to be tried. The problem the judge stated is that merely providing a link to the License Agreement isn't satisfactory. The judge required Ticketmaster to "force" visitors to view the agreement prior to viewing the information. Every notice that you have to say "I agree" before most software packages will install. Same idea here. Most websites have an "AUP" or "License Agreement" addressing the proper use of the information present on the site, but it's only a link. You aren't "forced" to say "I agree" every time you click. Boy would that suck! But it may come down to that. Hopefully another judge will overturn this part of the ruling (because people will always try to legally protect their piece of the pie, and I'd hate to have to constantly be clicking the stinking Javascript pop-up boxes anytime I wanted to look at something). What tickets.com was doing was in direct violation of the stated acceptable use policy on the ticketmaster site. But the judge ruled that becuase users were not "required" to view the agreement, it wasn't enforcable. The judge didn't say that the policy was invalid. In fact, don't be surprised when this case makes it up to the Supreme Court, and it isn't about Ticketmaster or Tickets.com, it's about the enforcement of "Acceptable Use". Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of Ticketmaster in any form. In fact, I was in a panel discussion last month at the Concert Industry Consortium conference, and the mediator had to constantly reign in the "Ticketmaster bashing" (as fun as it was). I kinda felt bad for the Ticketmaster rep, she really took it in the shorts. But hey, work for the Microsoft of the concert industry, and what do you expect. There are those of us who make our living by supplying information to the masses. We don't charge the users, we charge companies who want a shot at the eyeballs. It's the current 'Net model. The current status quo is this: an established data gathering organization concentrates the data into one location for private public use, and tons of little Internet start-ups mine their site and try to compete for the eyeballs, without doing any real work. Sound familiar? There's a word for this, it's *parasite*. While the vast majority of the net works in *symbiotic* relationships (I link to you, you to me, and we all share and gain), there are several of these leeches around, sucking off someone elses hard work. The real problem is, that if enough parasites attack a host, the host dies. As do the parasites. Then we all lose, because no-one else will spend the money to develop the data gathering infrastructure, and the information is scattered. It's still out there, but just all over the place, and not of much use to anyone. So keep information free. But leave the credit intact. We need those page views to keep the information flowing. Linking, even 'deep linking' isn't what this is all about. It's about money. If you want to prevent linking, use .htaccess, or even mod_rewrite to filter all kinds of goodies (Assuming you use Apache, and at the traffic levels we're talking about it's a must ;ob ). But don't lump data mining in with linking. They are two different animals. One good. One evil. My 2 cents... UugaBuuga If Amway is so great, why do they try so hard not to say the name? And now their online. Aaaack!!!
UugaBuuga
All I'm saying is that I've been doing that for years. Again, it's not my responsibility to show users what page they're on. I *do* consider it unethical, however, to defeat frames WHEN IT IS POSSIBLE TO SHOW THE ARTICLE WITH THEM. I'm not going to link to the front page and tell people they have to click these four different links to get to a piece of info; That's not what hypertext is about. It's about jumping right TO data.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What I want to know is, why is it my responsibility to make sure that someone else's webpage is properly branded?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Um, Duh? Hyperlinking is what the WWW is all ABOUT. That's the whole IDEA, and the reason that httpd exists in the first place; So that you can link between sites. NOT linking to other sites is bad etiquette.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Paul Allen a major shareholder in Ticketmaster who was suing part of MS empire... Let me guess? He didn't get his christmas bonus and decided to cash in through different means.
To boldly invent more hot water.
So maybe deep linking keeps the companies from filling their sites with crap. I mean, if Ticket Master's signal-to-noise ratio is so low that navigating their site is unpleasant, maybe they should feel some pressure to fix that. On the other hand, maybe they'll just be sure to put banner ads on every single page just in case of deep linking.
-Dave
Interesting (& true!) story... a few years ago, TicketMaster sued & had MS (MSN, maybe) remove a deep hyperlink. Paul Allen is a majority shareholder of TicketMaster. Yes, that Paul Allen.
Simply index all of Penn State (at least all that can be indexed) with hyperlinks on a website from another educational institution (ie. some other university) and then anyone can simply and legally attain Penn State stuff by first visiting a less restrictive school's student's site.
This kinda luddite practices with links is just the kinda kaka that is gonna lead to the "imminent death of the net" as predicted by so many soothsayers gone by. TTFN & Shalom.
-*BBC*PipTigger
They own the server.
They pay for it.
If they want to impliment a technical solution, that's their problem.
- jcw -
IANAL but here is what I think in more quasi moral/legal terms...
"1. A price comparison engine - backed by the database that is built by robots I built that scour other websites product listings."
should be fine: its a service to the community. Its not so common in the physical world because its a bit harder and requires more manpower (and less renumeration) but if someone wanted to do that that would be thier perogative. I imagine there examples of that outside of a basic friend to friend level. I don't think product prices are copyrightable (are they?) and even if they are would it be worth it to enforce it?
"2. Image grabbers. Say I want to have pictures for the products I'm comparing prices for. Is it OK for me to program a robot to retrieve these pictures, if they are publically displayed."
maybe, maybe not. In so far as the images are [most likely] copyrighted -- but I doubt a company, esp. the manufactering company, would have a problem with that...
"3. For that matter, content grabbers. Say I want to have reviews on my comparison engine site. Is it OK for me to grab other reviews from websites? Does it matter whether the content is original or not?"
If you call the content your own ABSOLUTELY NOT. That's called theft and plagerism. I am not allowed to publish a magazine full of articles without each author's consent, but I could publish a magazine that purely a bibliography... Same with the web, you're allowed to refer to but not "publish" other's information.
If its merely a link or even framed to the original AND it is attributed (hell the linked-to page should be self attributing) I don't see why not. I mean that IS the idea of linking right?
When I creat a link to something its different from appropriating it. If I put up a magazine article on my own web page, the author has the right to sue my ass. If I put a link to it he should have no right to sue me. why? because he still has control over the article, he can put up a registration system on his page or take it down all together -- I'm just pointing people his way.
"4. News grabbers. Can I take news and stock quotes from other sites and use them on mine?"
nope, see response to 3.
"But being able to aggregate content by myself without having to ask or deal would be a great boon."
To aggregate content/links is legal, open up a standard work and look at thier bibliography and footnotes.
To take someone's work and call it your own is not legal -- plagerism never has been legal.
Am I the only one who finds this ironic.
After all we are reading our news on Slashdot and not at news.com, wired, bbc, salon,....
This mainly applies to businesses, but also to private programmers: the only valid reason for designing a website is not that you're able to program. It's that you have got something to say!
It's a simple rule - please follow it. The net could have more sites like /. this way :)
www.e.magazine.dk
Does that mean that the court document that has the url which has a link to the host of the file is "offering" the DeCSS?!!!!!
...
t
Ok, I went to the MPAA site and they aren't linking but they "OFFER" and "provide" the address:
11. On information and belief, defendant Hughes either resides or has his principal place of business at
Defendant Hughes operates an Internet web site addressed as www.ct2600.org/2600-DVD.html.
full text:
http://cryptome.org/dvd-mpaa-v-4.htm#Connecticu
(Originally from: http://www.mpaa/DVD/Connecticut%20Claim.htm I think it's dead now)
I sent something like this to openlaw:
The Defendants did not "offer" anything per se from "their" respective home computer to download.
Liability is not placed on host. Make the court DEFINE the TERM offer, traffic, etc.
" Defendant Hughes offers to the public, provides, or otherwise traffics in, DeCSS through his Internet website. "
TECHNICALLY, HE did not "offer, traffic or provide, otherwise traffic" anything. So, he ftp'd something to a server, and he created a link to it. So he placed text around the link to let people know what it was. He did not provide the file. The host did. (and according to the unlawful DMCA they are not liable).
HE did not provide the file via hyperterminal from his home computer... He created a link to a place where the file is. BIG deal. People create links everyday. They can't bust you on a link...!
all he did was write a few lines of text that happened to be html code (i'm guessing a href =)
Oh, please. I can create a link to a site that has the link to the host that has the file. Does that mean they will bust me too?
Wait, does that mean that the court document that has the url which has the address to the site that has the host which contains the file is "offering" the DeCSS?!!!!!
So, in effect, does that mean that they, the MPAA, (and maybe even the court) are "offering" the DeCSS to the public. They have an url to a link in a public document to a host of a file and they have lots of text describing what the DeCSS does...
HMMMMMM.
can they be sued for harrassment?
I'm serious!
Furthermore, I searched DeCSS on Google and over 7,000 references came up and the few I checked out were links to sites that had the DeCSS file hosted somewhere that I could dl.
So, are they liable too? Why aren't they being sued. What are they going to do? sue everyone who has a link to DeCSS?
So defendants uploaded it to the site, big deal.
That is A PERSONAL WEBSITE. I mean come on, it's not like the defendants are google and are "offering" it all over the web in 1000s of links...
The 'defendants' are as much "offering, or trafficking" it as any search engine with a link.
And here's my other BIG question. Will webmasters/developers be liable for links too...
what if you are deving a page and the person wants you to link it to a site that has DeCSS.
Who is ultimately responsible. What? do I have to tell my client sorry I won't be responsible for this action...
-marcia
"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." (A. A. Milne)
sounds promising. why not make a quickie buncha scripts to search through their database and deep link to stuff it finds. or is that not protected because of some strange loophole i missed?
shaolin punk, activist post-industrial
Does this mean NBC has no legal right to sue 2600 & co. for having their domain (www.fucknbc.com) pointing to NBC's site? I already assumed they didn't even before I heard about this ruling, but still, it helps.
To me this whole lawsuit is just as stupid as the amazon.com patent on an idea (their associates program). Oh well, there will always be money hungry corprate pigs out there (especially on the internet!) no matter what. Another victory for the people 8^)
----
--
#nohup cat
Okay, how does that show that they're not a monopoly? Microsoft is a monopoly and pulls all the same crap, only it's a lot more than 20 minutes. And the MS tax is a lot more than $8.
They're a monopoly because every friggin' event you hear about says "tickets on sale at all Ticketmaster locations". Never heard of any other company in a sentence like that. Case rested.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Well, I read my news on Slashdot, yahoo, Time.com, newsweek.com, and Linux.com. The one doesn't exclude the others.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
And who says Tickemaster.com is a member of *any* community? They're a business, they want to make money, not talk with people. Also I've never read any "rules" about hyperlinking, and doubt any exist.
It's called http. You use it, you follow the rules for how it works. Namely, people can link you. If you don't like it, don't use http, because that was your choice in the first place. Or you can build a better mouse trap and script it so they have to enter from your front page, otherwise it won't load. Now they, the linkers, have to follow the "rules" of http and can no longer deep-link. But if either party gets outside intervention, the rules break, the system can no longer stand up, and (eventually) the entire web comes crashing down. This is why we follow the rules of the communities to keep things free--if not for the "rules" governing hyperlinking we call http, there would be no web, and there will be no web in the future without them.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Tickets.com at that point was attempting to be a meta-index of all tickets on sale everywhere.
The idea was that, instead of having to go to the web sites of every single company and organisation that sells event tickets, you'd be able to just go to Tickets.com and search. Tickets.com would be making revenue by advertising on its index pages.
Ticketmaster, of course, would rather you did the searching on its own site, and made it the first place you look.
The same scenario is being played out in many industries; for example, sites that are meta-indexes of auction sites or whatever.
Ticketmaster sued Tickets.com, alleging a whole host of things. Some of them may or may not have merit -- but the allegation that linking could be a breach of COPYRIGHT law was clearly nonsense, as can be seen by it being dismissed by the judge.
No copying takes place, after all; you're just saying 'go here'.
It's still to be decided if/how linking to another site might be misrepresentation and/or a breach of TRADEMARK law, but whether or not Tickets.com were doing the wrong thing doesn't change the fact that COPYRIGHT was never an issue.
Even if you think Tickets.com was 100% in the wrong, you should still applaud this decision.
Ticketmaster is NOT a monopoly.
I point you to this site, and I'll leave it at that.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Well, what a surprise: hyperlinks are legal! I really like the term "alleged hyperlinking" used in the article. As if. Folks, the whole idea behind the Web is that it consists of hyperlinks. Originally the whole of the Web was supposed to be connected such that you could get from one place to another via these links, without ever having to type a URL.
Attempting to prevent this was just another way that large businesses could corrupt and usurp an existing system, and this judge clearly made the right decision -- even if his reasoning seemed to be in the wrong context.
OK, so it's legal to deep link. Now, to what extent do people working in web site design consider that appropriate behavior? I'm curious what the netiquette is.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
D'ya suppose this will have any effect on those auction search engine companies that e-Bay (sued|is suing)? Sure e-Bay owns the actual database of auctions, but they offer up the pages- if the free and open pages are then cataloged and deep-linked to, then e-Bay can go piss up a rope, no?
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
Actually, I doubt they'd mind.
Now, if you somehow stripped out their advertising, they might have a problem.
You probably wouldn't get enough traffic to make it worth complaining about though.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
See for yourself. Go to tickets.com, search for San Antonio Spurs, and look at the first event. Look at the URL. Now modify the URL to go through your web server and you will notice the lack of a referrer.
This would work, except that Ticketmaster wants certain approved sites to be able to link to their events. To implement encrypted URLs, morphing URLs, etc, would require implementation on the side of the Ticketmaster partners. Apparently, this was farther than Ticketmaster wanted to push its partners.
What do you mean a URL rewriter? How can a page on one site change the referrer to look like it came from another site? I can't think of a situation where a smart enough referrer-checker couldn't be written. A more technical explination of your statement would be helpful.
> proxy the page from my server
But then you would be copying and redistributing the file and that *would* be a clear copyright infringement.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
> b) Referrer is supplied by the client.
Yes, individuals can beat "referrer", but tickets.com won't be able to put a simple link on their site and expect anyone to get through. In fact, it's *because* the clients supply referrer (rather than, say the referrer) that makes it a good solution. You can't expect Joe Blow browsing your site to set up junkbuster to lie about the referrer...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Besides the fact that making a place deep in a totally different website open up inside a frame on your website is incredibly obnoxious, and bad design, and irritates and wastes the screenspace of the people viewing, it isn't quite as easy to defend ethically or legally.
( ">You can buy what you're looking for here</A>, can they ban the words "You can buy the ticket from the ticketmaster website at the adress "http://ticketmaster.org/cgi-bin/#$#@@(*U&&!("? What about the words "You can buy the ticket from the ticketmaster outlet on 2343 Westheimer Street"? I see no difference between the three, they're just simple information on where to locate something.
While i know nothing and you should not be listening to me, keep in mind the differences: a link is really nothing more than a statement saying "this is where this piece of information is" in a way that the computer can retrieve that bit of information. attempting to ban that without permission has some pretty serious First Amendment issues. if they ban the HTML <A HREF="http://ticketmaster.org/cgi-bin/#$#@@(*U&&!
Meanwhile framing is a bit more iffy. By framing you are presenting the content as being yours, which has some intellectual property theft/fraud implications which are a great deal less rediculous than whatever basis you'd try to stop linking on. Even if the framing is done in a non-misleading manner, most internet users are not intelligent enough to figure out that the ticketmaster window inside the tickets.com website is a different website.
I suggest if you're going to deep-link to a competitor, you do it so the link opens in a new window. But, again, if you listen to me you're an idiot.
>It still does not stop them from litigation the case over and over.
Hasn't Ticketmaster already sued Microsoft because MSN was deep-linking to them? Does that ruling not apply here? Was there a ruling?
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
OK, If you're linking to another site's content, where are you making your cut from?
If I was tickets.com, I'd be trying to get customers to buy through me, not ticketmaster. Why would I be acknowledging my competitors existence, let alone content?
Of course, Big Business, even a monopoly like Ticket Master won't go down without a fight:
*Sigh* Guess I'll have to hold off on concerts for a while too... (in addition to boycotting Amazon for the 1-click lawsuit, and anything associated with the MPAA for the deCSS lawsuits)Guess it's a good thing I can post on /. for entertainment -- otherwise I might end up on somebody's W.A.V.E list. ;-)
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Furthermore, while what I can see of the policy addresses 1) companies, 2) organizations, 3) governments and 4) universities, it doesn't address the most common entity on the web: INDIVIDUALS!
This story talks about the *legality* of hyperlinking, so the University of Pennsylvania is breaking the law by *not* permitting it.
And, finally, since presumably the University of Pennsylvania relies on public funding (they are *not* a privately held corporation), this treads dangerously close to government-sponsored, pre-emptive *censorship*.
IMHO, either they are doing either a crappy job of teaching students about the fundamental freedoms that generations of Americans have enjoyed, or they are doing an excellent job of brainwashing their students into becoming PHBs.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Sorry, that won't work. I tried to get there from another educational institution and they wouldn't let me in. All I wanted to do was look at their fscking policy!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
What's so bad about noise? You people at slashdot take signal too seriously
Moderation & meta-moderation are horrible. If the first-posters, Natalie-worshipers and hot-grits-pourers would go away they wouldn't be necessary. That's what's wrong with trying to get a first post.
--
E_NOSIG
Proof, if proof were needed, that karma does not work. Here we have someone who, by dint of thoughtful posting and so on, has been moderated up enough times to get the +1 bonus, but who can't do anything better with it than to first post.
Plus, he can't spell "first post".
Plus, he wasn't even first.
Plus, if I were going to post something completely offtopic, I'd check the "No Score +1 Bonus" box to avoid moderators overly keen on the "overrated" option. Like this.
--
E_NOSIG
Well obvious to me anyway, maybe not to lawyers. Just take your banana and out run the gorilla. Oh wait, that's the solution to another problem. No, the real solution is to check the referer. A more complex is to maintain sessions within your website. And return hard core goat sex with children porn for everything else.
Don't get me wrong, I think the judge made the best decision possible in this case, but this is just another example of the e-lawsuit ad absurdum.
absurd? yes. Important? Yes. What this really does is set a precendent, as dumb as this stuff may seem when applied to common sense, it is good in the long run. These type of rulings give those running websites some sort of legal backing if the y link and the site tries to go after them. This doesn't protect those mirroring w/o permission or linking and hiding the url in a frame say so that you can't tell what site it is.
If ticketmaster were really miffed they could simply block the originating site's ip/domain anyway. This was probably more of an attempt to either squash the little guy or generate some pr.
this space for rent
a) Most legal teams are probably not up on HTTP headers, in the same way I am not up on Roe vs. Wade.
b) Referrer is supplied by the client. Something I do a lot on sites that disallow direct access to program binaries (wanting you to visit one of their add infested pages first) is:
$ lwp-request -H"Referer: http://badsite.com/" http://badsite.com/foo.tar.gz
In other words, I'm lying through my teeth about the referrer.
P.S. Referrer has four r's, HTTP standard be damned.
Nah, don't be silly. If I want to bypass this, and I own a web site, I'll write a 3 line Perl script to proxy the page from my server, and set the referer appropriately. Child's play, if you're determined enough.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
But I don't think that's bad; in fact, it makes my inner libertarian quite happy. That's what makes the web so great! I can put anything I want on my site, and you can put anything you want on your site (including any URL you like).
And of course, it goes without saying that just because you ask me for a page I don't have to give it to you; I might put conditions on that. (Like charging you for it, or making you look at an ad or a silly splash screen.)
The only way there could be a legal recourse is if the government has the right to tell me how my site has to look and work, and I don't think anyone wants that.
Happy Premise #3: Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.
This not only avoids the problem of them.com cheating, it means you don't have to update it when otherguys.com start siphoning your stuff too.
Alternatively, you can use cookies, or use URLs with magic numbers that are only good for a given session (or time out, or whatever).
(I forget which ticket mongers are which, so I'll refer to them as us.com and them.com, where us.com has the real information and them.com is siphoning it off.)
Or make sure your pages always include information identifying them as yours - put them in the text, or stripe the top of the images with your site info, or at least add your own advertising banners, so that the reader can figure out that it's your page they're seeing even if it's got somebody else's header frames around it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There have been other cases like this, particularly some of the UK newspaper "framing" cases, where the judges have clearly not gotten it. This was a big win, and web publishers that don't want people linking into their sites can easily enough deploy technology to prevent it, rather than going whining to judges.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Last week I was fortunate to hear Lawrence Lessig, an American law professor, speaking on Internet law (HP Labs, Bristol).
He's a superb speaker, and quite changed my views on lawyers 8-)
One of his central points was that although "Form may not quite follow Function" on the 'Net as yet, Usage quite definitely follows Form. Laws are the way they are, not because they're an arbitrary construct errected in a void, but because they're a codification of behaviour that is almost implicit in how the environment already works. This is good law, at least -- a law that tries to go against reality is sen as a bad law and may not be observed with any respect or dutifulness.
So where does that leave deep-linking ? Well, IMHO, if you technically can deep-link, then it's ridiculous to try and simply ban it. It's not going to happen - deep-linking will continue, despite.
Do I support deep-linking ? No, not at all. I think the argument that providing this content costs money and should only be available to those who play ball with the entire revenue stream model (you don't have to buy from there, but you should at least receive the banner ads).
Can we fix this tehnically ? Of course we can! If you're a potentially linked-to site, then it's far from rocket-science to see where the links are coming from, how they're presented, and to take appropriate action. Making all my pages self-unframing is obvious, but there's a lot more too. If ContentPirate.com want to link traffic to my site, then I'd love them to do that - it's better than buying advertising space. If I was a truly dynamic marketeer, then I'd have a range of special offers in pop-up boxes, all ready to launch when I detected the incoming link. "Hi, you've been redirected to GoodInfo.com from ContentPirate.com - look at the special 10% off deals we've built just to steal your business back from them."
Lawrence Lessig has a book out Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, on this and other topics. I strongly recommend it.
The HTTP idea is better, but even more annoying to those trying to refrence your site would be to add expiring keys to the url. You could do this by simply renaming the files periodically, perhaps adding random nonsense to the name, or by fake links that your server maps to real names. Your site would have to be capable of dynamically conforming to the ever changing filenames. This is somewhat annoying, but much less so if you are using a good server side scripting language (they are few and far between) where you could replace real page names with variables, ie. any request of 5ad523f13114446111abbes.htm gets directed to realfilename.htm. It's a little harder passing session/form info, but not that much harder.
This is not necessarily fool proof, depending on how you do it, those trying to deep link into your site can still try to examine your site each time it wants to serve their page linking to yours. This should not be a big deal to implement at medium sized web site, and it's probably cheaper to pay programmers to do this than paying legal fees on a topic which may get you bad press.
I think you should be able to hard link or even frame anyone's site. Companies don't have to make it easy, however.
Today, if someone deep links to me, I can cut them off based on referrer, or I can make sure that my content delivers whatever message that customers missed by not visiting my precious home page.
But in the bright, shiny future of XML, the bastard deep linkers will be able to repackage my data to their heart's content.
Of course, like ticketmaster, the future whiners will be forgetting that it's this unfortunately uncontrollable technology that created this easy-to-play-in marketplace to begin with!
Like ticket.com's lawyer said: them's the rules, you gonna play or not?
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
This is certainly unique to the Internet (and to the WWW specifically). Where in "real life" can store A sell stores B's inventory in an attempt to trick venture capitalist C that A's sales are booming? Such a thing is not possible!
So I am amazed that in the court room, where so much is based on case history, such a ruling could be decreed that ''deep linking by itself . . . does not necessarily involve unfair competition.'' I somewhat figured the court would not see the unique circumstances and environment of the WWW and rule that hyperlinking is not allowed without express permission, or some-such progress-reversing, revolution-stopping, Web-breaking judgment.
This is a good day for the World Wide Web.
On the other hand, could you imagine having to set up Trust Domains (a la WinNT) between websites before linking one to another? Yikes!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I loved this quote from the tickets.com lawyer.
''They are an open site and are a member of the free Internet community,'' Tickets.com attorney Daniel Harris said of Ticketmaster. ''They have to live by the rules of that community as it has grown up.''
If you cant do business here on the pre established ground rules, then dont do busines here. It's quiet annoying to see business always whinying because they started a website and now they arent making a billion dolars a day like they thought. So, their first response seems to be blame the other web site for cheating. DOn't buy into the hype of the internet because there just isnt enogh reality to that hype. Do your reserch, then do some more research, then start working on your idea, then do a little more research. But, for god's sakes, stop suing everybody because you didn't get rich and they did.
Of course, I have to wonder if the suit wasn't jsut an excuse to by tickmaster to drive tickets.com out of business.
"I mean, All you can definately say about a fellow who thinks he's a poached egg, is; He's in the minority." James Burke
And of course, this ruling may not be applicable to your jurisdiction.
It still does not stop them from litigation the case over and over. They plan on appealing, of course.
Ah, he's just a little guy with a slingshot. I'm not afraid. --- Goliath
Fight Spammers!
Not [exactly] true. Venues have contracts in place that binds them to use certain providers (usually TicketMaster) and they aren't allowed to choose different providers for different events.
So, Yes you can put on a show without TicketMaster, you just can't do it at most venues. Unfortunately this means an event has to be held at a venue that is not optimum (whether it be less capacity or whatever).
Pearl Jam tried to tour several years ago without using TicketMaster. They ended up playing places half the size the should have (why they didn't add extra nights I don't know.) and IIRC they ended up cancelling the tour halfway through.
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-Earthman
Earthman
Say it to me face w/ out wasting space...
1. A price comparison engine - backed by the database that is built by robots I built that scour other websites product listings.
2. Image grabbers. Say I want to have pictures for the products I'm comparing prices for. Is it OK for me to program a robot to retrieve these pictures, if they are publically displayed.
3. For that matter, content grabbers. Say I want to have reviews on my comparison engine site. Is it OK for me to grab other reviews from websites? Does it matter whether the content is original or not?
4. News grabbers. Can I take news and stock quotes from other sites and use them on mine?
As you can see, if the above were all legal, it pretty much enables anyone with some programming talent to create a really killer site. Obviously, I'd have to put things together in an original way. But being able to aggregate content by myself without having to ask or deal would be a great boon.
Please comment!
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I think what you'll find among webmasters is that most have no problem with people deep hyperlinking to their sites. Hay, it's traffic whether it comes in from the frontpage, or sideways. It's the big corporations and e-businesses that feel otherwise, such as eBay. Then again, they seem to have a problem with the slightest of things. Part of their strategy to keep "real" copyright infringers at arms length.
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JavaScript tutorials scripts
The only thing missing from the ruling is the judge didn't also rule that Ticketmaster is *the* company most deserving of a Justice Department anti-trust investigation.
Oh well, maybe next time.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
...its like posting a sign in your front lawn with a note attached that said "if you don't own this house, then you'd *better* not be looking here".
.edu and .mil. Its .com that are the new-comers. And what a culture clash it has created!
Ticketmaster's claim was obscene, too, but they are a company. Corporate greed tends to overshadow reason. Universities, though? They shouldn't be motivated by the same factors as companies, and they should be more knowledgable about what it means to be on the internet.
After all, in the early days, the internet was pretty much all
--Lenny
Tickets.com sends the deep link through a URL rewriter which nullifies the referrer header. It's not a good idea to block everyone with null referrer headers because many corporate browsers and proxies strip these headers.
If you don't want people to deep link. Only accept external referers for the home page.
I realize this requires a bit more overhead, but for christ sake, why sue over something that can be stopped with a technical tweak.
-josh
"Please, PLEASE don't let anyone know about our school! We have too much interest as it is! When will you people learn that our staff will enjoy their jobs sooooooooo much more if no-one can look us up on a search engine, be referred to us by alumni or get any info about us at all! We are trying to cut our student body down to zero, so our staff no longer has to put out any effort, and can spend their days in idle luxury."
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Maybe because different ticket outlets have access to different events?
I dunno about you, but as a consumer, I like having the diversity... if I do a search on Amazon for a book, and it doesn't carry it, I'd love it if they linked to another bookstore, as long as the other bookstore did have it...
All in the name of customer service!
As long as your competitor offers different service than yours, it doesn't hurt you to acknowledge them. It only highlights the differences; it's up to you, as a provider, to make sure the differences aren't negative in your direction, I think!
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
You make some good points, but I think you missed a critical one. Ticketmaster, rather than paying some techies to FIX the problem, paid some lawyers to file a frivoulous suit that had no merit, and which could have set a very dangerous precedent, had the judge and appeals court been clueless (this is ENTIRELY possible; read a random sampling of early decisions related to the internet). Ticketmaster's behavior was like me using a .50 caliber machine gun to shoot your dog when it craps on my lawn. Sure, I'm justified in doing SOMETHING, but I did the wrong thing and endangered a lot of uninvolved people.
In fact I hope everyone emails the Executive Director of University Relations.
Perhaps we could ask if we can link to the page about the "Linux Demo Day" they are having on April 5th.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Make sure you are coming from a university site too. Note that the difference between the two links that makes it work is the addition of a "www" before "guru". The other link is for usage only by staff *within* the university.
BTW, there are *certain* sites that have a "blanket exemption" to link into Penn State's pages: search engines.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Okay, if Ticketmaster.com, the web version of a larger corporate business, is an "open site", then what is a closed site? Intranet?
/foo/bar.html, then it's "closed". Of course if you link to /foo/bar.html and it says, "Hey! You didn't pay us!" then deep linking isn't a problem, because then only the subscribers can follow the deep links.
If it's designed for the general public to use, (i.e. any random website), then it's open. If it's backbehind a firewall it would be a "closed" site. (Of course you shouldn't even know about this site outside the firewall, but you get the idea.) I would go as far as to say that if it's a subscription only site that for some bizare reason only authenticates at the index.html, but not at
So in short, it's "open" unless someone screwed up REALLY badly, then it's "closed" so that they can cover their ass.
Very good ruling for the health of the Web.
/. and the various other (cringe) weblogs out there.
And a VERY good ruling for
Glad to see this isn't going to be another problem lawsuit. If a site doesn't want people deep linking there are plenty of technological ways to prohibit it, legislation is not necessary.
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+&x
(I talked about this in the Ask Slashdot about the 'Death of the Net As We Know It, and I'm rehashing now.)
What we need to do is set up a briefing packet for Congress. All of them. Discussions of the flaws in the DMCA, of UCITA, of the attacks on DeCSS and on anti-filtering. Logical, reasoned arguments against what's there already. Maybe sponsored by the EFF. Or a made-up think-tank with a grandiose title. (Sure, let's USE the ideas that work! We'll Open Source some political tricks!)
Any interest? I'd work on it, but I'm not sure I want to do it all by myself. I'd need some fact checkers, and some editors.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
As others have noted, the NY Times does exactly this, and it prevents access without registering and therefore seeing all the main banner pages.
Or they could simply look for a cookie, and if it isn't there, simply throw up a screen saying "Welcome to Ticketmaster!" that then loads the target url after 15 seconds. They wouldn't even need to enforce registration, then. Then only create the cookie in the main page and change that hourly. No one has to change an URL, yet everyone is fully aware that they are entering ticketmaster's site.
How much coding time would that take? How much did their lawyers charge?
The cake is a pie
I agree, it's a shady practice, and fraudulent misrepresentation.
But couldn't this be solved by having a standard logo/footer on every page that says "TICKETMASTER" or the equivalent? Then who cares if someone deep links you in a frame. Nobody's going to believe the page belongs to anybody but you.
Constitutionally Correct
Good decision on the ruling, it will make things easier on us poor web-builders. But one question on the article...
''They are an open site and are a member of the free Internet community,'' Tickets.com attorney Daniel Harris said of Ticketmaster. ''They have to live by the rules of that community as it has grown up.'
Okay, if Ticketmaster.com, the web version of a larger corporate business, is an "open site", then what is a closed site? Intranet? And what's this "free internet community"? Everytime the Internet community tries to get something for free (ie. mp3) there's a big hullabaloo and somebody gets sued. Twice.
And who says Tickemaster.com is a member of *any* community? They're a business, they want to make money, not talk with people. Also I've never read any "rules" about hyperlinking, and doubt any exist.
A good court ruling, a really, really dopey quote at the end. Thankfully he didn't pipe this stuff in court, else they could have lost.
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"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
that I can still use a hyperlink? A shortcut to another file, presumably on another web site? Gosh, what will the government uphold next, the ability to use ASCII characters? I mean, it's getting a little absurd when TicketMaster is trying to sue somebody for linking to them. /. better be careful, USAToday might get mad about linking to that story. Don't get me wrong, I think the judge made the best decision possible in this case, but this is just another example of the e-lawsuit ad absurdum.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
It has been perfectly acceptable for car manufactures to quote their competitions product, price, and features for years. They are providing information about a competing product, the same information any consumer could get. By providing a link, you are doing the same thing. The only potential abuse for this is to claim their work as your own, a simple disclaimer ought to take care of that.
I think that various commercial websites have figured out ways around deep linking, anyway. You just, via perl script or something, rename the deeper pages every day or so, but also rename the links within the pages, so the site links together as before, but only the front page retains a persistant name. Hey, TicketMaster! For half of what you're paying your lawyers I'll save you from that mean ol' tickets.com.
Uh, yeah.
"various commerical websites". Not that I patronize these web sites, you understand. They just tend to be at the forefront of, uh, 'agressive html design'.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
To:Ziff-Davis Publishing
From:United States Dept. of Justice
We have examined your website www.zdtv.com and have found that it is a special case.Our rulling on hyperlinking on a page doesn't apply to your extensively and seemingly arbitrarily hyperlinked pages.As a result we have consulted the geek community at large and have determined that your sentence is one(1) bombardment aka 'Slashdot Effect'This sentence is effective immediately.
Have a nice day.
The penguins have revolted...Visit The UPGR
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Thus Spake ComradePenguin
Presumably ticketmaster.com still doesn't LIKE deep-linking (despite being forced to accept it). So what if they implement a technical solution (of which there are many, some already mentioned here)? We still lose the feature of deep interconnectivity but I'm sure there's no legal recourse: "Hey judge! Make them let us deep link!"
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
[disclaimer: I'm a former employee of TMCS]
I certainly agree that we don't want to make
hyperlinking illegal but before you all go overboard with the Ticketmaster bashing, let me give you a little bit of background on this one.
Tickets.com was doing more than just hyperlinking. They were basically pretending that the content to which they were linking was their own. It's sort of like Slashdot linking to stories on cnn.com, zdnet.com, etc. (like it does) but all the while framing this content within their own site and never acknowledging that it is ticketmaster.com's content, other than a tiny little fine-print tag that tells the customer that they are buying this ticket from an some "other site". The effect is, customers think they are buying the ticket from tickets.com, not Ticketmaster.com
This is a pretty shady practice on the part of tickets.com. Here is why they did this: they want to be able to tell venues allied with Ticketmaster, "Hey, look, we sell tickets to every venue in the US!" in order to win over Ticketmaster's venue customers.
''They are an open site and are a member of the free Internet community,''
/all/ companies and individuals that join our `little' world would abide by that simple statement all our grief and woe would be unheard of. That's the way it's suppose to be, no?
Tickets.com attorney Daniel Harris said of Ticketmaster. ''They have to live
by the rules of that community as it has grown up.''
If only
ObOnTopicPost:
This is a very good thing IMHO has it vindicates the way hypertext and the net is set up. Free form, stream of thought linking. Make that illegal and our whole net falls apart.
Sgt Pepper