Another Publisher Challenges Legality of Links

NewtonsLaw writes: "It seems that the legality of hypertext linkiing has once a gain been called into question according to this story running on Wired.com. As the former online publisher of 7am.com, I was once threatened by the Nando Times in a similar manner when I was linking to their stories. Local TV broadcaster TVNZ also made all sorts of noise about the illegality of linking to their content back in 1966 but have since come to their senses. Over the years I've had similar bitchy complaints from a number of online publishers who simply haven't worked out that links from other sites are something to be encouraged because the drive traffic and boost search-engine ratings. A great resource for those interested in the history, opinions and law on the matter of the legality of linking is the Link Controversy page created and maintained by Stefan Bechtold. Most publishers eventually realize that trying to block linking through the courts is a really dumb thing to do -- but there's always someone who simply doesn't get it."

Comments

Why can't they just block it

[Sc00ter]

There are sites out there that block outside linking, they figure out that you're being redirected and send you to a nice outside linking not allowed page.

Why can't these fools just do that.

Re:Why can't they just block it

[antis0c]

Simple, they get no money out of it.

indeed

[Lord Omlette]

I laughed when I saw 1966. It's a typo, the article is from 1996. Duh.

Anyway, I'm reminded of something from the currently ongoing bnetd fiasco: The EFF linked to a Penny Arcade comic on the subject. Penny Arcade doesn't agree with the EFF and said, "Instead of linking to the comic, please link to the rant." One guy from the EFF said, "OK" and removed the link, then an hour later the link was back and an email arrived saying "Linking's perfectly legal, we'll do as we like." So PA changed the target of the URL to some messed up thing involving dogs and some old guy. Very amusing.

Moral: if you don't want someone linking to you, don't raise a fuss, just mess with your referrer permissions and all.

Re:Wise up

[Shiny Metal S.]

I would not be happy if some other site linked right to the old material, because they might not put it in context, and lead people into thinking it is current.

Then maybe you should use mod_rewrite with a simple rule:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://your.host/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/old-stuff/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/old-warn?page=$1 [R]

and put there a simple old-warn script displaying "This stuff is old. What do you want? [New] [Old] [Index] [Home] [Whatever]". Or why not include this warning on the old pages in the first place? Or why not to just put "Last modified XXXX-XX-XX, if there's a newer version, it's here." on every page which can be outdated in the future?

Linking is just telling people about your URI. If you don't want them to know about it, don't make it public, you don't have to serve anything if you don't want to. If you want those people to see something before they get what they are looking for, I don't know what's stopping you. The beauty of computers, including web servers, is that they do what you tell them to do.

Stealing Content and Representing it as Your Own

[securitas]

We have no problem with people linking to our site.

What we DO take issue with is individuals and companies stealing our content by linking directly to it and representing it as their own.

This is most rampant with graphics. We try to provide high-quality images about the products we review and the items we write about. Everybody likes big and clear pictures.

Many of these have to be converted from massive TIFF files into Web-sized JPEGs or GIFs. It may not seem like a big deal, but it takes someone's time and effort to optimize every image and fit it within our internal site guidelines to make it as accessible as possible to Web surfers at large. That adds up to a lot of time and effort.

There are those companies who steal our content outright without any attribution whatsoever. A friend was talking to one of his colleagues, who told him that his previous employer regularly visited our site specifically to steal our graphics. (That site has since gone out of business).

And there are those offenders who link directly to our content on their sites -- again without attribution -- causing us to bear the bandwidth costs of transmitting hundreds of megabytes worth of data without any credit, benefit or return to us.

We have found our content abused on major sites (household names), without any response from the Web staff of those companies when we try to contact them about it.

Most of our content is available for syndication. If you like it and want to use it, ASK.

As a footnote, we are considering acquiring and implementing some form of digital rights management, which is something we don't want to do. However, if we continue to see this kind of content theft, then we need to get it under control before the costs reach a point where we are forced to shut down our site.

Re:Stealing Content and Representing it as Your Ow

[Kirruth]

Corporate websites are a plague to the internet, a plague that comes in a candy-coated package.

Damn right! Corporations are a disease of the Internet. In e-mail, people get more spam and viruses than any other kind of message. On the web, the ads take longer to download than the content. Cookies and spyware are being secretly loaded onto thousands of machines. We made the Internet, and the corporations are trying to kill it for profit.

It doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to live in the world they would like to create. All we need are the right skills and the determination to use them. Let's make it happen!