Slashdot Mirror
Charging Cash For Links
DC2001 sent us the latest
internet scare piece running at Wired. This one is about companies
charging for the right to link them. Of course so far this is totally unenforcable, since it would render search engines worthless (Google
says they have 1,326,920,000 pages- if they had to pay even a penny
for the right to have each of these links, my guess is that we'd be
back to 1992.
Given the history of competition vs collaboration, I can sadly predict that the internet will be dismantled by 2005 by the same people who want you to pay for even having seen "Gone with the Wind" and for everytime you think of seeing last years superbowl. Notice how its no longer the"inter" net. Its the "net.
Face it, the people who stupidly shout into the night and charge for what they're shouting have absolutely no incentive for shutting up.
They'll shout at the politicians who'll screw us all over for a dollar so they can get run to try to get re-elected.
I have seen the future and its all reruns (pure gravy for the network who charge for every site that store 'em,) delivered from sites which charge a fee for every download. You will be able to watch "Gilligan's Island," for a price of course, until the alternative becomes attractive.
The internet, the grand experiment, is going to Hell. Venality and cupidity ally with stupidity to blow down the walls of Jerico and to smear the tracks to the New Jerusalem.
Soddom wins. Replay at 11:15, 12:15, 1:15 etc. and over the 'net when ever you pay to want to watch yesterday's news.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Of course so far this is totally unenforcable, since it would render search engines worthless
I'm not sure what CmdrTaco meant to say, but the above makes no sense. Whether linkfees make search engines worthless or not has nothing to do with whether they are enforcable.
As for enforcing a linkfee policy, that's easy. A small script on the server checks the referrer URL against a list of valid 'subscriber' URLs and pushes up content or an error message depending on the result. This is trivial.
The idea seems disgusting en-masse, but I could see several areas where referrer-verifying would be a valid technology. Some sites already use it to prevent deep-linking to content from an external site, and it's no huge leap to see that some sites wold be willing to grant deep-linking rights for a fee.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I don't understand "news organizations" that try to charge for back articles. The San Jose Mercury, for instance, puts all of its older (by a few weeks) articles into a $1.50/article "service." It's like they don't want people to use them for research; as if they don't want to keep selling those banner ads; and don't want to used for or featured in research.
Totally clueless.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Oh this is ridiculous. The article quotes someone as saying 'Such links have been common online for years' or something like that, but the fact is they've been about a lot longer. You can't charge someone if they give a reference to another article in, for example, a scientific journal, and this is no different. The reason they give the name and publisher of an article is because they don't have a way to directly allow you to see the article quickly.
But presumably linking is different, because you just click, and there the article is. So can you just quote the reference (name and publisher - i.e. domain), or the URL, so long as it's not a hyperlink? I can't see how making people copy and paste protects their articles, it just makes fewer people read them!
Presumably names and publishers of articles are taken to be public domain, because you can't copyright a book title and publisher in such a way to prevent anyone referring to it (or selling it!) without your permission. And anyway, most copyright acts (certainly the UK one) specifically allows limited quotation...
Oh this is too stupid for words... So I've said rather too many!
This is a fair use issue. Is the linker unfairly taking credit for work not his own? For instance, if I say, read this great article I wrote and then link to Commander Taco's essay on honeybuns, then I may be stealing Commander Taco's estimable work as my own.
There was a case several years ago in which, as I recall, Ticketmaster complained that Microsoft was burying Ticketmaster content pages deep in the Microsoft site.
Ticketmaster claimed that its content was losing its identity buried deep in a Microsoft web application, and that furthermore Ticketmaster wanted people to navigate to the content by first visiting the main Ticketmaster web page.
I don't remember how the case turned out, but Ticketmaster's case had some merit. One criteria might be whether the linked to material is clearly identified as external, and the owner of the material is identified in the text of the hyperlink.
Legally, a hyperlink is probably similar to a quote. I can usually quote David Letterman without his permission and not violate his copyright, but there are certain circumstances where I cannot quote him without paying him.
It is possible that occasionally some types of links are in fact a copyright infringement.
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
It's not only possible, but easy to enforce this by dynamically checking the referer and deciding if it is a paying partner. If you are that worried about deep linking, then your robots.txt file will exclude that content anyways (if you are link most sites, you will let the robot index the site, and then not allow regular users in. You'd be surprised what you can get into by setting your user agent to "Googlebot/2.1" or even better "Mercator-2.0" since some sites won't let Google on because of the view cache feature).
-no broken link
Personally, I'm sick and tired of the bullshit that 'businessmen' have brought to the internet. I've never seen such greed, selfishness and complete lack of awareness. 95% of them have the ethics of a snake-oil salesman. -- Drop into town, screw everyone over, use up all the resources to push your product, and leave witht he moola, onto the next town/resource that you can extort.
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seumas.com
What concerns me is this latest example of a blind grab for money in the light of questionable legalities. The Internet has become nothing more than another medium for questionable get-rich-quick schemes, many of which, unfortunately, are working and making lots of money for someone.
Hey, can I charge Switchboard for listing my phone number? Mapquest for listing my address?
Let them charge to their heart's content.
Just don't link to them. Then we'll have a de facto partition of the net into a commercial net and a non-commercial net (you know, like the one we had a couple of years ago).
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
reminds me of a funny story I heard in the early days of the big internet boom. A guy I knew at ZDNet went to a meeting with one of the search-engine-except-we're-a-portal-now companies and they went through a whole entire meeting with a half dozen people from each side discussing and negotiating, traffic, price, etc. Only at the very end of the meeting did they discover that each side of the table expected the other side to pay them :)
I have decided to charge the phone company money to list my name and number in the phone book. I have also decided to charge anyone who wants to print my address in any directory or listing. Furthermore, footnotes that use the titles of books I've written must pay a $50 fee for mentioning my book and probably an additional license fee for verbatim quotes of any size, above and beyond the right to mention my book.
There are technological means to prevent anyone anywhere from accessing any page within your web site directory hierarchy without going through the front page or any other hoop you want them to jump through. So they should be used, if an innaccessible site is the desired result. Check the NY Times for a great example of this.
I do not have a signature
- When you put up a link, it's as if you are including part of their web site in yours.
No, it's not "as if you are including part of their web site in yours." It's not including anything on their website unless you actually copy part of their website to add context to the link. This copying may already be permissable under "Fair Use" provisions in US copyright law, as well.Putting up a publically-accessable web page is like leaving an infinite supply of leaflets in a stack somewhere. You may make money by putting ads on the leaflets. If I tell someone "hey, there's a leaflet about Foo and you can find it in a pile on the corner of Bar Lane and Baz Avenue," I owe you nothing. In fact, if you gain revenue by distributing leaflets, I've done you a favor.
If the leaflets are for "paying customers only" it's your job to make those customers pay -- not mine.
Of course slashdot posted this article -- they have a vested interest in seeing this scheme fail.
:-)
Why?
Because they now owe the albequerque journal $150.00
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Q: Does iCopyright.com try to police how people are using copyrighted content?
A: No. iCopyright.com operates on an honor system. We serve the needs and interests of publishers, content owners, and customers by providing a way for them to do business in a legal, friction-free manner.
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