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Deep Linking 2.0 At NYTimes
Gentleman Goat writes: "The NY Times has a well-written article exploring the recent court decision about Deep Linking in closer detail. " Free registration required. This one goes deeper and talks about Web crawling bots and other issues related
to deep linking. Honestly I think the spider problem is a separate
issue. I think people should be able to say, "Please don't spider this
page" (robots.txt for example, but it gets stickier with copyrighted content) but I don't think anyone should ever be able
to say, "You may not link this page" since that is fundamentally the
anti-point of the Web. Check out the ruling from Japan that linking, in some cases, is illegal.
A good example agains this is internal coporate information. Putting this on the web reaps the benefits of being easily available to the employees of the company, while not being public information.
That's what .htaccess is for. Otherwise, it's like putting the private information in a folder under the doormat and hoping nobody will stumble over it. The 'normal assumption' for info on the web is that it's public. Requireing auth is a perfectly legitimate way to indicate information that is NOT public.
to conduct business via the web does NOT make it ok to deep link to my bank account information. Neither is it ok to deep link to sites that provide content on a fee paid basis.
The link itself should be a non-issue. Other sites are perfectly free to deep link into my account info, as long as the bank server replys with "You are not authorized to view this content" or some such. A site stealing the user/pass for the info and using that to get to the data is another matter.
Web servers are like a business establiushment where if the door is unlocked, there is implied permission for the public to enter.
I understand that some sites get revenue from advertising, and they are free to do that. They are perfectly free to have their server refuse the request if the referred_by is from an outside site. (Or be more creative and send a redirect to their index page). If Ticketmaster had any sense that's what they would have done. The whole lawsuit could have been avoided for $60 - $200 worth of man hours. I'll bet it cost more than that just to ask their lawyer "Can they do that?" As a side benefit, their competition would have ended up with egg all over it's face. (priceless)
In addition, Ticketmaster contended that deep linking interfered with its economic relationships with advertisers, who paid handsomely to advertise on the site's home page. Finally, the company said that Tickets.com was guilty of "passing off" and "reverse passing off" -- forms of unfair competition -- because consumers might confusingly conclude that Ticketmaster and Tickets.com were connected in ways detrimental to Ticketmaster and beneficial to Tickets.com
This paragraph of the article seems to me somewhat like the software industry's claims of damages resulting from piracy. Given that certain people would never have purchased a product due to various factors, simply downloading a pirated version doesn't really cost them any money.
I understand that ads generate revenue and that ticketmaster would be upset by people bypassing ads. However, the "offending" deep linking still takes the user to a page containing a banner, and ticketmaster will still receive a service charge, so what are they complaining about? Perhaps they never would have made that sale had the user not gone through the site doing the deep linking.
Just a thought...
I once had someone link their ebay auction to a picture on my server (without my permession.) What I did was wait until he had one bid (so he couldn't modicfy the auction) and then replaced the picture with some pornography. You'd be supprised at how many hits he started to get!
In retrospect, I spamed my server more by changeing the picture, but I think it was worth it.
If your afraid someone is deep linking your site, and you don't like it, just change your links. It's not that hard. And if the Japanese ruling holds any water, you may be able to get them into legal trouble depending on what part of they world they/you are from. *smile*
Quack
This has come up before, and there is a strong argument against contracts that you agree to by having seen them. Could I create a contract that said:
Well, you'd better hope not. Ticketmaster.com is saying they had contracts on display on the site, and that by using the site you're agreeing to those contracts. Sure . . . and hey, when I change the non-read-only license agreement on Sun's software download pages to "I 0wn j00 Sun Software", that creates a legally binding contract too . . .It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
In the /. intro, it says
I think people should be able to say, "Please don't spider this page" (robots.txt for example, but it gets stickier with copyrighted content) but I don't think anyone should ever be able to say, "You may not link this page" since that is fundamentally the anti-point of the Web.
I agree. The very nature of the web would suggest that the act of accessing a web page was making a copy of it. Therefore it is difficult to see how anyone could say "You may not copy this page" because by the time you see this message you have already made a copy. Now - can this argument be extended to making links to a web page? If you consider web pages as a broadcast, rather than a published work, then I see no problems with unaltered content being mirrored, as this is merely an extension of the broadcast route. Mirrors and partial mirrors may prove less obvious. If in the process of making a partial copy you imply something derogatory or contrary to the original by changing the context of the page, then this is covered by libel or slander laws anyway if the case is sufficiently serious. Not to say that this doesn't happen already in the newsprint media - quotes are truncated and put out of context all over the place. Of course, the waters are further muddied with trademarks and other such concerns, but I don't believe that changes the base rules. It would be a sad day if the courts stopped linking to other sites - it wouldn't be a web anymore.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
However, if you do not impose such a lion at the gate, then you have declared your urls to be available to the web by whatever means folks choose. Its like saying that I can't buy a copy of a newspaper and post an interior page on a (paper and tack) bulliten board. Gee, so many of my book marks are "deep links". Is my bookmark file illegal? O well... When you can 't win by a legit means, litigate...
Good manners sez you don't link into someones site as part of your content (as opposed to a link to send them there), without some "By your leave". Now if we are going to legislate some manners, I have some manners employed by drivers near the "Big Pig" in Boston that I would like to have included ;-)
So, I'd imagine this handy little trick would work in /etc/hosts
208.48.26.217 www.nytimes.com
which means whenever you look up www.nytimes.com, you get partners.nytimes.com instead.
Maybe the solution all these up-tight corporate sites (like the NY Times) will be to make even more obnoxious use of cookies, http referer values and more invasive authentication to "protect us".
Well.. better login to slashdot so I can post this...
but I don't think anyone should ever be able to say, "You may not link this page" since that is fundamentally the anti-point of the Web.
... does Taco take it down?
So let's look at an example:
Joe Developer has a good idea but not a lot of money, he hosts his site with information about his project on a $9.99/month hosting plan where he gets 200MB of transfer a month.
Someone submits Joe Developer's page to slashdot because it's a valid "news for nerds" item and Joe gets slashdotted. Within minutes, Joe contacts Taco saying "Don't link to my page!"
Let's say he practices what he preaches (see quote above) and says "You can't tell me not to link it!" and leaves the link up. Joe Developer gets 500,000 hits in one day and goes over his allotted bandwidth by 20GB. At $5 per 10MB over his allotment, he now owes his hosting company a $1000 in overage fees and Joe Developer removes his site and goes bankrupt due to the "fundamental point of the web." (Note: I think Taco would remove such a link under these circumstances, this is just an example of why one size does not fit all.)
So as you can see, there ARE cases where someone should have the right to say DON'T LINK TO THIS PAGE. While much of the web is built to get traffic, some pages are not meant to be slashdotted for a number of different reasons.
So while I agree that a site that invites enormous amounts of eyeballs shouldn't deny linking (i.e. NYTimes, CNN, etc.), sites that do not aspire to get traffic should be allowed to control how they are linked.
Now, if only Apache would deny based on referrer like the old NCSA servers did. *sigh*
That's it right there. Ticketmaster does have a virtual monopoly on tickets to events it advertises. Since you have to go through them to get your tickets, they want to leverage that to force you down a clickstream that exposes you to as much paid advertising as possible.
OTOH, sites like Amazon, which don't have monopolies on the products they sell don't seem to be making any noise over this issue. Why? Because deep-linking gets you to buy from them instead of surfing your way to someplace else.
With Ticketmaster there is no someplace else, so that's no help to them.
...that if you put something up on the web, you've made it publicly available for people to link to.
What's the big deal anyway? If you put enough of a header/footer on your page that identifies the site, and show's links to other content (Say like ZD) then people will go to the stuff that interest them, and you've gained a reader from the "deep linking"...
If you don't want people to link directly, protect your articles/materials behind some CGI that at least makes it more difficult.
Just my three (Canadian) cents (that add up to 2 US cents).
BlackNova Traders
Is that it can be applied to the NY Times as well.e rlaw/07law.html. In other words, change the www to partners.
For example, to bypass the login for this article use
http:// partners.nytimes.com/library/tech/yr/mo/cyber/cyb
www.eFax.com are spammers