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"Deep Linking" Controversy Renewed in Texas
DaDigz writes "Wired News is reporting on a cease and desist letter sent to an independant news site by Belo, corporate parent of The Dallas Morning News, forbidding them from linking to individual stories within the site. They claim that the author can only link to the site's homepage, and attempting to link to stories within the site violates their copyright."
Next week Time Magazine will require you to read pages 1-36 before reading the article
you want on page 37. Don't complain, it's their copyright ;)
I can't deep link to an article, but I can email it to a friend?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Since when does copyright law force you to read anything you don't want to? The example in the post of reading the first 36 pages before you can view page 37 is exactly right. When I go to read a magazine I'm not compelled to read the table of contents (complete with blinking flashy full size ads) before I go to read an article, why would the web be any different?
In other news, footnotes in term papers and publications are now illegal according to these idiots in Texas. hehe.
fp
Fuck my mouth after fucking my ass.
Dirty shit everywhere...oh wait...
Click here or here.
They need to take this up with their web designer. Deep linking is easily preventable.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
. . . use refferal checking like babelfish, and quit complaining.
should have technical solutions, not legal ones.
The Dallas Morning News has the means to break all links which do not come from their site if they do not want people deep linking.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Two (2) lines in the web server's config file would have solved the problem. Even if they pay they're sysadmin $1000/hour, and he has to read two hours worth of documentation to find that out, it would still be more cost effective - the lawyer fees are probably well above $100/hour, and it won't end in less than 10.
A cease and desist letter should be considered criminal harrassment in this case, and the lawyer behind it should fear being disbarred for sending out such a letter. But there's no chance of that happenning.
Oh well, at least I'm not a US citizen, so it isn't MY taxpayer money that will go down the drain. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about my legal rights.
this just in, "Linux advocate web site slashdot.org (NYSE symbol OSDN) sued for deep linking on an article about deep linking. In other news, ACLU defends rights of deep-link advocates and also defends terrorists rights to burn down ACLU headquarters." *sigh*, what next...
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
This is such a subversion of the inherent structure of the Web...it's like putting up a billboard on the freeway but restricting anyone from reading it from a car.
What does their copyright on news stories have to do with what page is linked anyway?
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The solution for this case is technical, not legal. If you don't want people to link to you, have your server check that their browser sends a referrer url from your site. If it doesn't redirect them to your front page or an error page.
oops
i think i just broke (c) law. aaaah!
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Don't all the search engines 'deep link'? I guess the new search engines will only point to home pages. What a crock!
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
As much as I dislike it, the owners of the copy write do control the distribution of their intellectual property. If the post their creation on the web that does not mean that others can make use of it however they feel like. These sites typically generate revenue from adds or additional features on their main page. By bypassing them you are removing the incentive to have web based content. While I would hate to have to pick through a web site trying to find an article that /. or another site is referencing, I also cannot argue with the desires of the site in question.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
No need to sue...
Maybe instead they should fire their webmaster for being clueless...
that the Internet is a public forum and if they want to avoid people linking to a publicly accessible page, they should require at least a login.
cause people filter referers! (for example, for privacy reaons)
"Basically your honour - we just want our advertising revenue" Chuckles procalimed.
This is stupid. Instead of wasting time and money going through the legal system, how hard is it to just check the HTTP_REFERER and anything that doesn't come from your own site, send back a location: header and forward them to your own homepage?
Don't link to them. When enough people don't link to their crap, they'll wonder why nobody's looking at it.
Next, they are going to try to make bookmarks illegal (real or electronic)!
--vk--
Taco, on the other hand, ...
(And no, no points for getting the correct "their")
It is surprising, but sadly it might violate existing copyright laws according to this Wired article.
-Dracken
From the article:
Belo says that those links "can result in a viewer not understanding that the content is on our client's site"
If your webpage is so poorly designed that a 'deep link' within the page is unclear as to which site you're reading, your webpage is badly in need of a redesign.
Think For Yourself. Question Authority.
There are plenty of websites out there that don't allow this because they use "sessions". Most of them that I've seen are shopping sites. If they implemented this, then it would simply not be possible for anyone to link into a story. Period.
Just my $.02
Playing devil's advocate, what's stopping XYZ news from giving each story a unique ID ## -- (2398472364.html or whatever)and rotating it to a new ID every 20 minutes in their links on the main page, and rotating the filename correspondingly. Solves that problem rather quickly.
Just as much as someone has the right to link to anywhere on the site the site has as much a right to obfuscate things as they see fit.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Freedom of speech, freedom of expression.
Do you think you have a 1st ammendment right?
Better yet, do you think you have any rights at all? You are no longer a citizen with rights. You are a consumer. Only one thing can change that, provided you have a 2nd ammendment right. Oh wait, the Federal Government put laws ontop of the 1st ammendment too.
Do you think you have any freedoms at all? Granted you exercise your first and second ammendment rights...nope, can't do that, we are slaves, errm I mean consumers.
Here's a "deep" link for you - the feedback form. Please fill in all Name, Email, etc. fields bogusly and tell them their policy is idiotic. I classified mine as
If you're an ASP type of guy, try this. You have to plan ahead a bit, but DIY beats not having to deal with people who aren't polite about linking.
[o]_O
I can't imagine how someone would claim it is copyright infrigement if the "infringer" never touches the content in the alleged infringing act.
As has been stated before, if you don't want someone to get your content unless they go through your site, don't serve it to them. But don't expect other people to implement this for you.
It's easy to block unauthorised links from offsite by checking the HTTP 'referer' header. Then if the user came from offsite, just redirect them to your homepage.
Are these guys dumb or what?
According to the Belo lawyer:
Excuse me? (1) I can easily understand that the content is on a different site, and (2) the deep link in question has a large advertising banner prominently displayed across the top of the page.IANAL, but it sure sounds like this lawyer doesn't have a legal leg to stand on.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
If they dont want people 'deep linking' (is this like deep sea fishing?) then they should take steps to prevent it with portals or frame's. The internet is public space. Web servers are public space, If a link can take you anyplace on a web server then you should be allowed to go there. If you want to stop that then password the page or use other means to prevent access.
ever thought about that?
The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.
The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.
Captain Corporate:I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that's *completely* wrong! I *own* 33% of the web and 95% of 'RL' media! You can't link to my sites with wanton abandon!
Dammit
--- Do you believe in the day?
Time Magazine would be at least twice as expensive if you didn't have to flip through all the got milk like mike! ads to get to that article on page 37.
If we want to continue to get free content were going to need on-line advertising to work. Otherwise we're going to have to pay.
That said, attempting to do this with legal channels is stupid -- don't put the content up there unless you can make money off the individual page views. What these guys are doing should be perfectly legal. The only time this should be illegal is if you take the content and put under your own ads -- now that is a copyright violation.
Haven't you people heard by now? Deep linking without proper protection has been shown to spread disease and if things really go wrong it may even cause you to spawn child processes and multiple web pages.
We have a serious problem with sick websites and internet overpopulation, so please stop deep linking each other, OK?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Comment from the newspaper:
One of the ongoing issues with Web content is that it's free, and how do you make money off that?
Well, you DON'T, it's FREE!!
Of course they might mean Free as in Freedom, but then why are they sending C&D letters?
Instead of wasting time with lawyers, why don't they just come up with a complicated procedure for making links like the government does over at thomas.loc.gov? They could even leave out the instruction manual, making it technically difficult to the point where most people simply wouldn't bother and would instead link to a more user-friendly site...
It is pretty easy to let somebody know you don't want them to deep link. The easiest but most effective way would be to use a cookie system where if the web page doesn't detect a cookie that's only established by the home page, it redirects you to the home page. Heck, if you were a good web designer, you could even provide a link back to where they were trying to go.
Can people still deep link? Well, with that method, I don't see it happening very easily. Let's say they did, though, so what? If somebody wants something bad enough, they'll obtain it. You're far better off appealing to their good nature. If you ask somebody politely to send them to the home page, they'll comply. If I linked to a site and got an email that read "Could you please direct them to our home page?", I'd likely comply, or at least work out a solution.
Anybody who cries foul when a website is being used the same way every other website in the world is used really doesn't belong on the net.
"Derp de derp."
Obviously Belo owns the copyright to the article in question. They control how the article is distributed. If they wish to only allow the article to be accessed through their home page, that is their right.
"Next week Time Magazine will require you to read pages 1-36 before reading the article you want on page 37."
No, Taco. You're oversimplification is what I've come to expect from the janitors here. A better analogy would be "Next week Time Magazine will not allow you to photocopy their magazine, rearrange the page order, then pass it out to people on the street."
Obviously the internet department at the Dallas Morning News is run by ignorant sales goons. The real issue here isn't deep linking, so much as - will newspapers continue to screw themselves with such blatant displays of stupidity when it comes to dealing with the net?
:b
This case will pass quickly. I worked for a guy at a paper who would have probably raised the same stink - figuring that maybe there'd be more money for the department after it was said and done.
Idiots
And what is a "Deep Link"? Aren't all the documents on a web server stored on a hard drive? Last time I checked, the surface of a hard drive has no depth that would differentiate the height from the bottom of one document from another. So I am lost of the Dallas News argument. As far as I am concerned about my web site, all pages on it are home pages. I don't care if you link to "index.html" or "/news/04-02-02/index.html". Just link. The Internet is about information and making a clear route to it.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I guess somebody better break the news to Make a Shorter Link that they are going outta business!
-- Adam
I used to live two doors down from this guy, and I'm
wondering if he hasn't annoyed Belo into sicking the
lawyers on him. Avi Adelman usually means well, but
his implementation always left a little to be desired.
Case in point: He asked us for our phone
number so he could call us in case of an emergency.
It was unlisted and unpublished. We thought he was
just being neighborly, until we noticed he had put
together a phone book and distributed it all over
the neighborhood!
He also needs to mow his lawn and maybe repaint his
house instead of tilting at yet another windmill.
as far as the Court is concerned between:
e s/050102dnspomavsbrite.1b9f8.html ?
This
and
This: http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/topstories/stori
As far as I can tell people only complain when you actually embed a hyperlink in the source, rather than just display it as plain text. A difference of 15 characters.
Perhaps we could simply argue that we are just writing down the address of the story, it's the damn user's browser that is turning it into a highly-illegal hyperlink!
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
-- begin belo's position
"ultimately that this is our content and we should have some control about where and in what way it is used. We'll see what happens in the law and in the courts to decide how to proceed."
--end
This is such crap. If you want to control your content then fine, do it. Placing a web page on a public web server is like placing a stack of flyers in a student union. Sure, it's your content, but you've given up direct control of who get's their hands on it. If you want to make sure that people only see content the way you want to then you'll have to try something else. Like making people login (aka NYT).
Seems to me like all these problems arise from the fact that people don't understand that a web server is by default public. Same with the internet in general, being the 'open' standard that it is.
Bookmarking will no longer be allowed, as this constitutes "deep linking", and may allow you to by pass certain material. Also, Mozilla, in a proactive response will no longer allow "cut-n-paste" features for URL.
Never confuse volume with power.
As seen here
Someone notify the feds!
if you deep link to content in googles cache who gets the nasty letters? is it you or google.
this sig is deprecated
They Blow Goats(tm). So if I BUY a paper, I must read the fucker sequentially? Horseshit! Fuck them and the horse they rode in on!
Yes, maybe they could implement something that would prevent deep linking (like checking the referrer page), but they probably figure it's only a matter of time until someone finds away around that and deep links anyway.
This might lead to something reminiscent of the coding wars between AOL and MS over the Instant Messenger client.
The point is: they are trying to establish their right to assert a _policy_. This is why you would go through legal channels. Once you have established that as a right, then you could implement measures to prevent deep linking. This way, circumventing those measures would already be established as unlawful.
The locations of articles within the Dallas Morning News website is content itself, created by their employees (and computers).
By replicating the service by which users may find articles in the website, the linker is copying the copyrighted table of contents information, and using it for profit.
Fair Use allows copying in small amounts in otherwise creative commentary, but if a website reorganizes the table of contents to most of the online newspaper just to keep people looking at their own banner ads, then it needs to pay for the privilege.
Which makes me wonder how long www.1stHeadlines.com will survive.
--Blair
Once again a clueless company tries to use the ham fist of the law when the problem is technical. If the newspaper doesn't want other sites linking directly to their stories, they should serve them from a database with dynamic URLs and keep their front pages updated.
Technical incompetence on their part is not equivalent to copyright infringement on mine.
Consider if at the offices of some content publisher, an employee is giving out free copies of said published content at the back door.
If you tell everyone you know that they can get a free copy of the content at the back door of the building, have you violated anyones copyright? Hell No!. Why is deep linking any different?
The obvious solution in the above analogy is to stop the employee from giving out free copies. How is the web any different. If you don't want people to be able to access your content in a certian way, find the appropriate technical solution to prevent them, or don't put the content on the web in the first place.
I will never understand how anyone can consider linking to be anything but free speech.
-- jason k.
Along with quizzes on each page to make sure you're actually reading and not just clicking straight through to 37..
I'd change that link -- you're deep-linking a Wired article without getting permission. =)
You sir, are an idiot.
wasting mod points is life long job.
Most of these links require you to register with DMN...so where is the illegality in that?
This is sorta funny, because a couple of days ago I was bounced from something on Angelfire with the message, "In order to ensure that pages can be delivered faster, you cannot link to an Angelfire member page from another site." What I found hilarious about this is that although you can't click a hyperlink, you can right click, copy the URL, paste it in the location bar and go there.
Actually, for a very similar reminder of how this copywrite can be beaten, let's look back to the big RIAA case against 2600.com 2600 decided they would post links to every mirror carrying DeCSS or relevent source on the web. The RIAA told them they couldn't, so instead of posting links, they posted a huge text list of the URLs instead, which was entirely legal and the RIAA couldn't do anything about it. Same issue here, they're pushing these huge copywrite laws that can easily be bypassed with a few seconds of thought on anyone's part who wants to reference someone to the story.
Bottom line: Not allowing links to sites is a lot like not allowing peoeple to walk through the right side of a double door thinking it'll prevent anyone from entering the building.
The Internet, one place where if you're not right, someone else will set you straight... maybe.
Here it is, enjoy!
Edith Keeler Must Die
What's wrong with linking ?
that this is a really crappy article. Do not read this article!
sulli
RTFJ.
Really simple here:
The web is a "highway". Your browser is a "car". A page is a giant "billboard". Ok, lets break it down- They are now saying it's illegle for you to look at a "billboard" they posted on the "highway" from your "car". Not only that; it's "illegle" to "tell" your friend "about" the billboard on the highway so "he" can go see it himself. I agree with the other "people" here. If they didn't want people to "view" their "crap", they should have found a different way to presnt it.
Gee, a password would work. Imagine that. But then, it sounds like they don't want to enforce the copyright on everybody, just some people. Uh huh.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The issue here isn't whether or not Dallas Morning News can prevent deeplinking through a variety of solutions, but whether they should be preventing deeplinking at all, and whether they can force another website not to link.
This issue has come up before, but the only situations which appear to have been supported as copyright violations by the courts have been cases where content is deeplinked, but buried in a framesite to make it appear that the linking site owns the content being linked to (similar to about.com).
I checked some of the links refered to, and BarkingDog a) clearly identifies the source of mateiral and b) has set the links to appear by themselves, without any appearance of ownership on the part of BarkingDog.
This will hopefully get thrown out of court nice and quickly.
Beware typoes.
Guess I better find a new homepage:
;-)
http://news.google.com/
Switching to:
Slashdot.org. Oh wait. Shit!
Guess I better find a new life
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Belo also owns some local TV and Radio stations in Seattle. They're probably using this as a test case in what they deem a friendly (and gullible) circuit court.
As a Texan by birth, can't say as I hold out much hope for justice in this case.
And as for Time magazine - I rip out all the ad pages before I read it, or Newsweek for that matter. It's my magazine, I can do what I want with it. And I do.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
On page two of the article it references a clause in the website's TOS that says you cannot link to anything besides the homepage. The terms of service page states:
"4. Links to, and frames of, the Site. If you operate a Web site and wish to link to this Site, you may link only to the home page of the Site and not to any other page or subdomain of us. You may not frame or utilize framing techniques that involve any Marks, copyrighted material or other proprietary information (including images, text, page layout, or form) of any portion of the Site or suggest any relationship between our Site and you without our express written consent. In addition, you agree not to decompile, reverse engineer or disassemble any software or other products or processes accessible through the Site, not to insert any code or product or manipulate the content of the Site in any way that affects the user's experience, and not to use any data mining, robots, cancelbots, spiders, Trojan horse, or any data gathering or extraction method in connection with your use of the Site."
(emphasis mine)
It seems to me that this is explicitly spelled out in their registration terms of service. While I agree with previous posters that their web gurus are easily able to, and should block outside referrals, it seems like they have a valid case here.
Belo is the same company that partially funded the braindead CueCat concept back the the dot-com boom "flush money down the toilet, its the way of life" days. And likewise, therefore pushed the lawsuits to stop those evil hackers who are opening our precious free product that you don't really own just because we gave it to you.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
As long as they cite the source of the article as someone else's I would think this should be perfectly legal. It's the same as writing a research paper and then giving a direct page number in the works cited page from the magazine you read it from.
"The ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech to the same extent that speech is free. Making the reference with a hypertext link is more efficient but changes nothing else. . . . There is no reason to have to ask before making a link to another site."
--Tim Berners-Lee
What I don't understand is, if these companies are so dead set on not allowing deep linking, why they don't just use Referer Headers to block the links. I'm sure it would hammer their servers, but they could set it up such that anything that doesn't come from their website is automatically forbidden.
I think they would lose a lot of business this way, but it would be a lot more legal and significantly less shaky then attempting to challenge people's right's to link to articles.
Belo will quickly change their position to allow free linking to anyplace you like.
The Economics of Website Security
How is this different from citing a source by page number in a printed work? That too is a form of deep linking, albeit (usually) not in electronic form. Do we now need to sue everyone who actually wrote a paper in college?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
They never complained about being linked to. They complained about specific info being linked, in a specific way.
As the creators of the content, they should have the right to control how and when that content is made available. And to whom.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
It's like someone referencing a book in an article, but not being allowed to find a REAL copy of it. So referencing violates copyrights? Boy, my english teacher sure taught me wrong.
...Well copyright laws are just getting applied wrong and until we tell lawyers to start doing their jobs properly they're going to keep doing stuff like this (if you got paid thousands of dallars to draft stupid warnings like Wired News got you would, wouldn't you? You'd go out and find ways to generate more warnings too, and you'd agree with anyone who asked you to write one too!)
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Don't all the search engines 'deep link'? I guess the new search engines will only point to home pages. What a crock!
Never mind that - it could be the end of slashdot. I wonder when Taco will be getting his "cease and desist" order(s)!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Why this isn't a "capabilities" issue instead of a legal issue is beyond me.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
How would the advertisers feel if no one had ANY links to dallasnews.com? (Although, that may make ads cheaper, if not useless).
This was, I think, the case with some other deep-linking complainants (who didn't think of just fixing their pages instead). However, in the case of the Dallas News, this doesn't seem to be the problem. Possibly it's an unthinking copycat case. Really, I can't see what they're complaining about -- they gain a visitor, who will view their ads, possibly click on them, possibly browse the site further, which they wouldn't have gained otherwise.
DallasNews.com doesn't like it's advertising being bypassed, and it's trying to set a precedent.
Not a legal (per se) precedent, but a financial one: Deep link to our site, and we'll sic our lawyers on you, which we can afford and you can't. We know what your doing has already been upheld as legal in court, but we still don't want anyone doing it, so we're going to attempt to bully you.
Intimidation, pure and simple - it has nothing to to with legality or technology. Notice no suit has been brought - there's merely the threat, which is enough to get most people to stop.
This problem is easy to fix technically, without using the refferal address. By putting no system in place to protect against deep linking in a medium designed for extensive linking they put themselves in harms way.
BTW, technical solution is to use session tracking. The homepage sets up a flag in the user session which article pages can check for. If not found send the user to a landing page for incoming outside links.
If they really cared so much about their copyright, they could just have all their pages check the Referer URL of incoming requests. This is easy to spoof, but it at least forces somebody to go through some effort to use the site in a manner they deem incorrect.
Other than that they should just get over it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I'll defend to the death, the rights of a content creator, to control how s/he chooses to redistribute their content.
If you're opposed to putting limits on how something can be redistributed. Then I assume you have no problem with someone violating GPL, and redistributing Linux as a sealed, sold product. With no source attached.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
First of all, DMN ought to be glad for any reader they get, no matter how.
Second, these guys are morons for standing in the way of what brings in more readers than anything else- a higher Google ranking. Google largely ranks pages by the number of links to them from other sites. If DMN makes a stink about deep linking, other webmasters won't link to them anymore- kiss of death. The web worked this way even before Google, but now it's more important than ever.
This is not just a matter of marketing style, salesmanship technique, or professional opinion- it's a strict, technical fact, that marketers and webmasters must heed. If I were in charge over there, I'd kick some sense into the jackass who made this decision- or fire him- quick!
Don't DVD movies force you to watch things at the beginning?
Don't forget to visit Stefan Bechtold's Link Controversy Page that has links to legal articles, cases, technical solutions, link license agreements, hyperlink patents and related stuff.
Unselfish actions pay back better
...To get slashdotted?
:)
I refuse to believe that these yahoos both put their content on the net and then expect people to change the way they use the web while viewing their content! Especially since it is in their power to control access to their info while still making it available on the web.
We're supposed to believe that these people are so technically inept and unimaginative that:
They can't figure out how to do this with cookies, hidden data, dynamically changing links (bad idea since people would link to invalid url's), or referrer data? They also can't figure out that the net is inherently a public place unless they take measures to prevent that? They can't understand that a law won't change the way people not subject to the law operate? They can't understand that naive people will continue to deep link to their content until their lawyers contact them, endlessly?
Impossible. No functionally literate human is that stupid. Therefore, this must be a cpublicity stunt.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Gosh these folks aren't too swift, or maybe it isn't a money thing
What's the definition of "deep linking"?
Is this some kind of special URL that is not the same as every other URL? Is the anchor tag somehow different?
Last time I looked, it was all standard run of the mill URLs.
"Deep Linking" is a myth made up by people who don't understand the technology they use.
If you don't want other sites to link to your content, just check HTTP_REFERER and redirect to your damn home page.
I hate it when clueless morons invoke the law to accomplish a purpose better served by one frigging line of code.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
"By allowing TV viewers to go directly from Channel 2 to Channel 50, they are denying channels 3 through 49 of valuable 'click-through' advertising opportunities. This will not stand!"
Drink blood - 50 trillion mosquitoes can't be wrong.
I hate this hell hole. No, really.
:P
As if it wasn't bad enough that we have one of the highest IT unemployment rates in the country, The humidity here can make you sweat through your clothes after sitting in it for 15-20 minutes in 80 degree weather, and I've lived here all my life.
PLEASE LET ME OUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD
Other than that, Texas is a nice place to live
arcane for life
I wonder how they would treat thier example. By clicking above, you get a page that has a link to the original article. So, linking to icopyright is just one step removed, and (so far) free. I wonder if icopyright takes this linking-to seriously. By allowing linking to their site, they can generate revenue for themselves, but at the same time, they diminish the "protection" they offer to their customers,
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Think about it -- doesn't every "story" here on Slashdot start with "According to this link...", and takes you to a deep link within a news site?
.. well.. news?
How's that going to affect Taco's biz? Imagine if we can't link to the relevent article -- doesn't then news cease to be
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I propose that Slashdot, from now on, only provides links to pages in the Google cache.
This will achieve three goals:
Thoughts?
PS Did
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
You are missing the point here. They are NOT redistributing the content. They are pointing to the content that is in its original distribution point! As someone who defends to the death the rights of a content creator wouldn't you want to open channels that get content exposed to as many people as possible? Or, apparently you want to limit the reach of content creators so that only a small fraction of people see their valuable content.
I am a sociologist who recently published my thesis online
"The decline of our inner cities."
In the report I cited SAT scores of several large inner city minority communities.
My point was to bring attention to the need for better schools.
I have been linked my numerous hate groups who are using my data to defend their twisted views.
Linking by Google is great.
Linking from some crackpot shines a negative light on my work.
Bullocks,
I don't know about you guys, but when I followed the deep link to the news article, I still saw plenty of adds and when I went to kill the window, I still got a pop-up add for my trouble. I don't think they're being placed in a bad position with respect to their advertisers at all. If anything, they're in a bad position with relation to their readers.
I notice that slashdot never misses the opportunity to post articles regarding deep linking. If deep linking became illegal, slashdot would suck, or just not exist. All the news items posted here are deep linked. When was the last time you saw a post that linked to wired.com, but not the article. It's like, "hey, there is a great article on open source something-or-other at osdn.com but we suggest that you just go to their homepage and look at the banner ads, oh, and by the way, good luck finding the article."
Where does the line get drawn? If they detect that you didn't download the ads because you had image loading turned off (or otherwise had some filter to block them), are they gonna come after you?
What I said, was that if the linkee doesn't want to be "deep linked" they should absolutely have that perrogative.
As the creator of the work, I firmly believe that they have the right to control access to it, on whatever whim they have.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
isnt blocking outside links a pretty standard and really easy practice? Why dont they just block outside links from the server config?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Maybe you shouldn't have released your data to the public then...have you heard of a PDF file?
with restrictions.
Restrictions which they are currently trying to enforce.
Do I think they are misguided, for putting restrictions like that on their content? Absolutely.
BUT... I absolutely belive that it is their right to put those restrictions in place as well. The content is theirs. Just because they made it available in some way to the public, doesn't take away their ownership of it.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
...well, unfortunately I can't seem to find it, even via www.archive.org's "wayback machine," but I could have sworn that in the old days when the Web meant lynx and lynx by default took you to a CERN page with some introductory material--INCLUDING an EXPLICIT statement that the concept of a "home page" was a completely arbitrary convention, that there were no features distinguishing a "home page" from any other page.
Hyperlinking between pages at ANY level is the essence of the Web.
Aren't there any W3C standards that still say this?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I never said they weren't idiots. Just that they were just idiots.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Say in some lawless country that people can link to and will link to the real site! Kind of like telling a friend to tell a friend about an article in the magazine. Which friend gets in trouble? The one with the knowledge or the one asking?
I now sue someone because they told someone else to look at page 50 of the book I've freely given away? That's not their problem, that's my problem: I'm the one giving books away. If I don't want people reading page 50, I shouldn't be giving it away. If I want them to read page 1 first, then I need to make it impossible for people to read page 50 first.
ScienceSeeker.org
Don't DVD movies force you to watch things at the beginning?
Some do, some don't. That's another thing that bugs me. Just load the index and let me choose what chapters I want to jump to. Stop treating everyone like a consumer to be abused by forcing them to sit through your previews on a DVD before they can access the content they paid for. If CDs were invented in this century they'd force you to listen to track 1 (which would contain nothing but previews and a license reading) before accessing any other tracks.
Chicago Tribune
New Scientist
CNN
Tech Industry Forum
Slashdot
Keep looking, you'll eventually find it
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
Have any of you realized, in that article at Wired, they 'deep-linked' to that Dallas News article as well..
Well, where's the cease-and-desist order for Wired?
Double standards? Hmm?
Karma: Bad (but who really cares anyway?)
Some (most) try to. On my DVD player I always put in the CD and when it starts playing the ads
I hit Stop, Play, Root Menu then I can select the menu item to play the movie.
I haven't come across a DVD yet that this didn't work with.
On the other hand I don't have many DVD's and I don't rent very often either.
-- this space for rent --
Does that mean that I must not reference
"War and Peace", Pg 367 in my bibliography?
I must reference "War and Peace" only and
you read it to find the exact passage.
I am linking to your post which contains an "illegal" link. Did I just brake the law too?
It always strikes me as insane that this argument keeps getting trotted out. They're attempting to misuse a law that's not suited to their purpose when there's one that was so kindly gifted to them...
If it's really such an issue, check the HTTP_REFERRER. If it's not your site, bounce them back to the front page. You can do it in a couple of lines and then you get to sue anyone who goes around it under the security circumvention clause of the DMCA. Great, now you can stop wasting everyone's time with nonsensical positions.
Actually, thinking about it, will someone go and patent that suggestion so the media conglomerates can't use it? I won't claim prior art if you use it sensibly.
Next week Time Magazine will require you to read pages 1-36 before reading the article you want on page 37. Don't complain, it's their copyright ;)
Yes, but you plonked down the $5 for your copy of time magazine. You didn't for this newspapers web site. I had the same problem several months ago with people using deep linking to videos on my site. The result? I was getting nailed for the banwidth to provide content to other sites. Rather than kick and scream, I just locked thier site out. I feel that the newspaper in queston is well within thier rights to stop the deep linking. Though I will agree with the majority of people here in saying that the solution is technical, not legal.
The technical term for that is barratry , and it is cause for major countersuit. I think they should countersue, asking for treble the amount the Dallas Daily News wants.
I'd agree - and I'm enough of a hard-head to do it. However, most people faced with that sort of decision will back down. (IMO, from what I know about people and the commonplace illogical fear of lawyers.)
To me, this is a disturbing trend in our over-litigious society - he who has the most lawyers wins, by grinding you down, or scaring you off.
dic-tion-ary please.
brake - as in to to press the brake pedal in a car in order to slow it down
break - as in to commit a crime, and break the law as a result
Remember that others do this too, such as our friend[tm] CDROM.COM!
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230-(FTP.CDROM.COM) without prior written permission by Digital River, Inc.
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Not to be too poetical, but this is a threat to the net.
The entire internet is based around deep linking.
Imagine how much of a pain in the ass the net would be if NO ONE used deep linking, and ONLY linked to the home page. Worse yet, I have a road runner website: so can TimeWarner/AOL force people who want to link to my site to "link to the road runner homepage, and give instructions on how to get to my site"? That's nonsense.
So, you lame corporate spamming fucks, if you don't like deep linking, GET THE FUCK OFF THE NET! As if corporations have actually done anything useful for the net anyways.
Sorry if you don't like deep linking, but its a fact of the net. Putting up a website and then saying, "but no one can deep link" is like buying a car and then bitching about how crazy everyone drives. You don't like how other people drive? Get the fuck off the road, then, old man.
Deep linking is, simply put, a fact of the net; and a good fact. There are many other good facts of the net -- file sharing, freedom to express alternate ideas anonymously by creating accounts from public computers, etc -- but deep linking is one of the most important ones.
Not only does deep linking SAVE the netizen time and pain, but it also SAVES the netizen bandwidth because he doesn't have to download useless ads. But corporate netinazi's don't like that; they try to say that a netizen who uses a deep link or makes one is a neticrook. But really, these netinazi's should be happy, because deep linking saves THEM bandwidth too. Why should they want to use all the upload bandwidth to navigate a user through several layers of their site, when that user knows specifically where (s)he wants to go?
I argue to embrace and extend deep linking by creating a few scripts for your home page which allow users to view "stories" and "images" from other pages in a defined box on your page.
Make a script that goes to the desired link -- automatically logging in with your user ID (if necessary) so that your user doesn't have to log in -- and retrieving the desired text and images ONLY, and placing them, reformatted, in the box. This way, the person visiting your website doesn't have to get any unnecessary crap.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Belo's own site deep-links to the archives of the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Certainly a different experience than what the author intended; better call the cops.
Looks like Microsoft knows where the money is: they can sell "copyright management" to businesses because the people running those businesses don't understand technology but do understand law. In their quest for "security" (i.e. the preservation of their assets against a threat they don't understand), these businesses are betraying the public at large, i.e. their customers.
And they're fighting a losing battle. Just about everything that has been done so far to place an artificial restiction on digital content has been circumvented (region coding on DVDs is irrelevant, as is CSS, now) and will be in the future, one way or another. A little trust in the average consumer or maybe just plain optimism would be nice but that's not typical of big business. Microsoft knows this (since it is one) and is shafting its own customers (big businesses, whatever about the little "home user"), selling them something they don't need.
The irony is huge here: content providers want to restrict access to their material, Microsoft is offering them a "solution" that restricts them to its own product. They would be far better off applying existing (or, I probably should say, "original") copyright restrictions on distribution and sensible technological measures when it comes to distributing their own product (for example, requiring someone to identify themselves before they download something is most probably sufficient to prevent them from publicly distributing it themselves afterwards).
This story is the ultimate in silliness. That news company is trying to change the way the Internet works - and the reason it exists - just because they don't know how to set up their equipment.
And legislators are ignorant enough of technology (and too busy listening to the wrong people) that they might succeed. I'm not looking forward to the day when I have to download drm.so just so that someone can use a public website.
Belo is the company that had the web savy to give $37 million to fund the cuecat.
Apparently they have money to burn....
:q!
But he [Baradell] said that Belo's position is "ultimately that this is our content and we should have some control about where and in what way it is used. We'll see what happens in the law and in the courts to decide how to proceed."
/. crowd, but how about DONT PUT THE INFO ONLINE. You can't run an anonymous, public web server and expect people to do whatever you ask of them. There are ways of allowing people access to your site other than a court order. *sigh*
Uh, this may seem obvious to the
I know, I'm preaching to the converted, but this just bugs me. Who's the IT guy? Can I slap him?
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
With a story invloving "Deep Linking" I would have expected to see many flames of "Deep Anal" or "Deep Throating". You lazy-assed good-for-nothing flamers! You should be ashamed of yourselves.
A hyperlink is merely a reference, like a footnote, no more. There's no way hyperlinking could be illegal.
And deep linking is in their best interest. All of their imprint information (their masthead, their ads, etc.) appears on the deep links anyway.
If the content were being displayed on the independant site without any of the paper's identifiying or profit making information, that would be one thing; but it's all there. Unless, of course, they only get ad revenue from impressions on their home page, in which case they're idiots.
What are they going to do next, sue Google for indexing their site (or are they dumb enough to have a norobots tag preventing google from seeing their content)?
I can understand when a web site asks very nicely to link to their main page, rather than deep link to a specific thing on their site, but asking and demanding are two different things. Then trying to get the law to say you CAN demand this, and sue people who don't meet your demands - well, that's insanity.
What's the definition of "deep linking"? Is this some kind of special URL that is not the same as every other URL?
According to RFC 2396, an absolute HTTP URI consists of http://[userinfo@]host[:port]/path. If path is not empty, then the link is considered "deep".
Will I retire or break 10K?
# foil the deepest linkers!! /^http...[^/]+somesite.com/) { /\n\n";
if ($ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} !~
print "Location:
exit;
}
...or something like that. what the hell is wrong with people that they would seek a judicial remedy when it's so trivial to solve the problem on your own?
sinister conspiracy of lawyers maybe? sheesh...
This Like That - fun with words!
How is defending the rights to ones property suddenly barratry?
I agree that they should have designed the site so that deep linking wasn't possible.
But legal restrictions ARE a means of prevention as well. Just a significantly less appetizing one to me, as well as most of the audience here.
Just because you don't approve of their means of control, doesn't mean that access control is evil for it's own sake.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Me thinks that they just want to be able to show more pop-under ads and to force more people to register on their website to see the info.
"A better analogy would be "Next week Time Magazine will not allow you to photocopy their magazine, rearrange the page order, then pass it out to people on the street.""
Wow - got nowhere better to troll? If you hate it that much, then go somewhere else.
Both your and Taco's analogies are wrong - its more like "Next week, some free info pamphlet will require you to flip through all the pages to get to that interesting article"
I A N A L
Is there anyone here who IS a lawyer who'd be willing to provide an amicus curiae explaining to the court why this is a load of garbage? Pointing out three things: 1. that since there is already a technical solution (referrers), the plaintiff likely isn't entitled to damages because they have made no attempt to resolve the problem on their own and limit their damages (I don't remember the legal term for this, but a lawyer should know what I mean); 2. that since the linked-to page contains their advertising content and their masthead, there are no damages anyway; 3. that the definition of Hypertext Transfer Protocol and Hypertext Markup Language implies deep-linking!
And isn't there some kind of resource center for sane Internet IP law advice/legal representation? Sort of an ACLU for Web issues?
Belo says that those links "can result in a viewer not understanding that the content is on our client's site"
Yeah right. The link on barkingdog says Dallas Morning News - Dallas businesses assess damage (early edition)
Yeah, that's certainly very confusing, what with the way he hid the actual origin of the content and stuck it in a frame to make it look like it came from his own site. </sarcasm>
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
'Course, if they could figure that out they probably wouldn't be harassing people about linking to begin with.
Here's my biggest gripe for these cases. For about 1/4 of the cost of lawyers they could simply configure their webserver to redirect to the mainpage when it encounters a forign refer URL. Good lord, it's not that hard of a thing to do.
Get good ol' Jakob Nielson on your defense, he says Deep Linking is Good Linking. And I totally agree.
Seriously though, who is actually losing in this situation? Not having direct (deep) linking on your site confuses the users.
I mean, it would be highly impractical if I posted a link to a week old article on Slashdot on my website, and merely linked to slashdot.com. How exactly is the end user suppost to find that article? Sure, he/she could search Slashdot.. but why should they. It only wastes bandwidth and [more importantly] time for the person trying to find information. Why make it harder for them? It's a person asking "Where is the closest supermarket?" "Oh, it's in San Francisco!"
Not only is it bad for users, but it's bad for the other website - where they may never return because information is so hard to find.
... about the only real case in which I can see a reason to allow linking from some certain URL, is when the user has to say "Ok Dad, I am already 18 and have the right to access the pr0n you offer" or "Ok, I have read your stupid license rant and pretend to follow it."
:))
In such a situation the solution is to pass an ever-changing secret from the linker to the linked. Make it be md5(grandma's socks color + microtime()) or something. As only you know the color of your grandma's socks, you are safe and can keep the precious link to yourself. But do not user referer-checking for anything, even your grandma knows how to fake it
From belo.com's website, their contact address is: blc@belo.com. Let them know you think their policies are idiotic. If you're in Dallas, tell them that you're going to consider cancelling your newspaper subscription, and stop reading their articles. They'll get the clue.
I ran across a truly brainless website recently.
My (not quite as brainless) web site marketing guru had the bright idea of creating a "links" page and then inviting the linkees (without obligation) to return the favour. Nice idea, I thought - our link to their site costs us nothing, it helps move them up the google ratings, and if they are nice people, they will link to us. If not, who cares.
All went well, until we received one nasty email reply saying that under no circumstances would the company allow us to create a link to their site! Not their deep pages, but their home page!
(In case you are wondering, no, there were no complaints about us sending junk email, and yes, we got several return links.)
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
As a Dallas resident, the call to the Belo home office (214.745.8383) is free. I've made five calls so far, and each time I bring up the C&D regarding BarkingDog I get forwarded somewhere else. The end result is always the same, I end up at an automatic news tip hotline and I'm asked to leave a message. I've left some fun messages so far, considering it's a news tip line. I wonder if they'll actually print a story on alien children seeking crack in upscale neighborhoods.
After going to the Dallas Morning News' front page, I can see cleary that it's not designed to allow you to actually find news stories. Gotta be one of the uglier designs in history. Makes CNN look easy to read and navigate.
Can't blame people for wanting deep links, the front page is worthles.
They claim that the author can only link to the site's homepage, and attempting to link to stories within the site violates their copyright.
This isn't about copyright. If you go in via a "deep link", you see less ads.
Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
Deep linking is easily solved. We use a product called AppShield and with that you have to specify start pages, if anyone comes to your site on any page except the start pages they get redirected and you can redirect them to the home page. Problem solved.
It's worth looking at if you can view flash pages. Make sure you've got your speakers turned on too.
Well, if you'd be so kind as to point out my spelling mistakes, I'd much appreciate it. I pride myself on being a better speller than most, but sometimes I do hit the wrong key on the keyboard.
I did check again and cannot find what you reference. I wrote the letter in a personal tone, thus the contractions and terseness, so does that perhaps cover what you're bitching at me for?
Have I lost my mind? Or are these bozos just spening a heap of cash on lawyers and displaying how utterly incompetent they are at their business.
Obvious and simple solutions that would occur to even those with 6 months in the biz:
1. Nasty javascript stuffed into a JSP or ASP include to ensure that the person is coming from the previous page.
2. Tag the user with a session object that does effectively the same check and redirect.
Maybe if these guys spent a little less on litigation they would have enough money to hire better people than the brain-dead 12 year old who is the technical genious behind their, no-doubt copyrighted, lame ass site.
whew... That feels so much better
I dug out some information about this "Dallas News" outfit. It seems that you cannot call anyone using an extension number. It's called "deep-phoning", and it's against their corporate rules. You must go through an operator who'll put you on hold so you can listen to some crap, advertising and copyrighted Musac. Also, You cannot mail directly to an office or a department ("deep-mailing"), nor can you go yourself directly to the office of someone ("deep-visiting"). Morons.
If I say to you "There's a neat picture in this book Y on page Z" and you go grab book Y and flip to page Z without reading the rest of it, are you somehow redistributing? Are you in violation of copyright? NOT.
Copyright does not enter here as no COPY is made. You are providing a signpost or link (driving directions, a page reference, nothing more) that tells someone where some content is. How you describe that content (if at all) is up to you, but you certainly are NOT redistributing it NOR are you COPYING it.
The visitor must actually visit the other site and the OWNER's web server distributes any information. Therefore how the heck could you be violating a COPYright? Can't can't can't!
I can see objections to mirroring. I _can't_ see this kind of BS attorney-drive goonery as it pertains to linking. There IS no COPY therfore no infringement of COPYright.
Think of another equivalent. I've built a house with murals on all the outside walls. You drive by... I've told you "Gee, the mural on the left wall is neat!" so you go look at it. You don't make a copy.... the only information is provided by the original source. But suddenly you're violating (or so is the bogus claim) copyright because you didn't look at the front wall first?
I think you need to understand what is actually occuring here and understand the actual nature of copyright law to understand why such tactics boil down to lawyer-aided thuggery.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
...there's no copying happening here. They can have their copyright... nobody is copying anything.
If I take a book that Taco wrote and photocopy it and give it to you, I may have infringed on Taco's copyright. But if I tell you "go over to Taco's house, find the book with the green cover, and read chapter 4" I'm not copying anything, and I'm not infringing on anybody's copyright.
Next thing you know billboard owners will be suing yahoo maps for giving directions that don't pass by their signs.
This is even more ridiculous for anything newspaper like, i.e. that updates over time.
If there's a good reference article, is that article _really_ going to be linked off their home/front page a week from now? Well, duh, no.
So your choice is either link to the article (so a day, a week, a month from now people can read it), or pray that it is findable from the site. Net result-- loss of readers.
Imagine if you could only tell people "Hey, I read something on Slashdot, go look it up off their home page". (And this site is fairly clueful in indexing...)
A.
We want to know.
Just don't link to their site at all. If they want people to not even know that they exist, I would think it's their problem and their bankruptcy.
I shouldn't even mention that they have a web site, but if they did, and you knew the domain or could make a reasonable guess as to where non-profits are parked, well, you might be able to find a site with a directory called "/about" and if you found that you could see their page "/linking_form.html," where you could request to be allowed to link to them but I'm starting to regret even saying anything because I don't want to get sued or prosecuted under the DMCA or something worse because really I'm not a criminal by nature I should just learn to shut my mouth.
so, if i use their site, then i'm bound by their linking verbage. of course, they don't define the term "use".
so, if i don't use their site, but rather, come across a URL of theirs from another source (let's say, a search engine), then i've never used their site, and can't be held to their linking provisions?
anyway, the terms of service also say that you're not allowed to data mine, run crawlers or run bots. so, if they chose to smack Google, they don't have to rely on deep-linking, they can call it non-conforming use of their site.
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
If the website owners want to keep users from accessing certain pages directly via links on other sites they need to protect these pages. To leave these pages out in the open and expect no one to link to them is ridiculous. That is how the www works!
The pages can easily be protected using cookies or URL rewriting (for those who refuse cookies). Just keep track of whether or not a user has visited the home page. If they have, allow them to go on to the protected page, if they have not, redirect the user's browser to the home page. You might even let the user know that they were redirected, and offer them a link to the page they requested.
This would be much better than sending a cease and desist order, because no one would be able to link the pages in the first place. Oh, but that's too much work, maybe it's easier to threaten.
Sig free since 2/6/2002
Years ago, I had a Mac extension (called IceTEA, I think) that hooked into the Mac textedit routines. It looked for text strings like http://, ftp://, mailto:, foo@bar.com, etc. and caused the text engine to display them as active hyperlinks.
With IceTEA installed, any text field that use the textedit package (which was just about everything except MS Word) could contain a hyperlink. Weird, and wonderful... and an excellent example of why arguments against deep linking are just Plain Old Stupid (POS) ideas.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
This is the stupidest thing I have heard all year. These people are complete and total idiots and should not be allowed to live among the rest of us in a civilized society.
A the cost of hiring a lawyer to take a case to court far outweighs the cost of hiring some college kid to write a small script that verifies the browser's URL referrer before sending out a page.
The college kid can give the website owners the result they want (preventing deep linking) by this evening. Hiring a lawyer to accomplish this may take months or years, and there is even the risk that the lawyer may lose the case!
Supposing that the lawyer wins the case, enforcing every website in the world to not link to the news site is difficult and likely impossible. The script that some college kid wrote in a few minutes will prevent deep linking almost completely - save one small exception. That exception is if the user sends a fake URL referrer. (there is also the problem that a small minority of users have firewalls with security settings that strip URL referrers) I doubt even 1 person in 100,000 would go to such lengths to prevent having to click through 3 pages to get to a site. In the case where even one user obtaining a page without getting it via the homepage is unnacceptable (no nastigram from a lawyer or a judge's ruling can completely prevent this), a user logon system can be created.
Regardless, hiring a web developer to create a solution to prevent deep linking is a cheaper, quicker and more effective solution for the company to prevent deep linking than hiring a lawyer. The company is incompetent for not knowing this.
What's an LP? And why does it matter how fast it plays?
My website's terms of service say that by visiting, you must give me $50. I have had three people visit. Where is my money? Could I possibly win a lawsuit against them for a violation of these terms? NO. You are not binded by the terms, unless you agree to them. And it has been shown that "by viewing this website, you agree to these terms" is NOT legally binding. I could surf there for hours and never read the thing.
Frivolous. NEXT CASE!
"Next week Time Magazine will require you to read pages 1-36 before reading the article you want on page 37."
Not quite. They will forbid you to tell your friends that the article is on page 37. You'll have to say "It's in Time Magazine but I'm not allowed to tell you where."
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What's most problematic about situations like this is that big companies can often get individuals out of the game with the mere *threat* of a lawsuit. As with so many things these days, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, it matters whether you have the money to prove it in a court of law. Most individuals don't, thus, as David Keith said in 'They Live' - 'it's the golden rule - he who has the gold, makes the rules'.
http://www.dallasnews.com/registration/cs_form.htm l
Everyone should inform the technical staff at the Dallas Newspaper of alternative solutions.
I think Belo has a axe to grind with neighborhood activists in general. Last election the Dallas morning news endorsed Tom Dunning early and often in the mayoral election. The barking dogs website endorse Laura Miller, the victor in the mayoral campaign. It seems like this is a payback by the DMN.
all they need to do is set a var that redirects, I mean to say, im glad they didnt go to the code department and yell!, haha middle management are such losers, they should just unplug their machines and send them back, save everyone energy and hassle.
pretzel_logic
They claim that they don't want anybody linking to anything but their homepage, but they don't have a robots.txt file on their website. The robots.txt standard has been around since 1994 to give website owners a simple way of denoting that certain parts of their site should not be indexed by spiders. According to the standard, the absence of a robots.txt indicates that all robots should consider themselves welcome to access all of the pages. Why is The Dallas News calling out the lawyers when they haven't made even the most basic effort to denote that they don't want search engines indexing (and hence linking to) their articles?
I'll simply stop reading Time Magazine. Or the Dallas Morning News, for that matter.
However, when I follow "deep links" from Slashdot or other sites, I tend to hang around and see what other stories are there. I should think that any news site, be it specific topic or not, would want traffic driven to their site, any part of it. I can buy a newspaper and just read the comics, but I'll still be exposed to whatever advertisements are on that page. However, if they force me to follow a different path that suits them, I can get my comics somewhere else.
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
Don't these folks realize that links to there articles on there website, will in the long run bring folks to look at other articles on there site. Linking is good, you get someone on your site and then they find something else worth looking at while there.
I often look at other articles when I hit a link to a website. But granted some websites are not designed right to utilize this correctly. Most have sidebars with links to other topics/articles. Which is good for finding other stuff once you are there..
To show you how stupid I think their argument is. Where do grocery stores put the milk? Right, all the way in the back. Do you think that's by accident? No they want you to walk through the store and see everything they sell even though you're only there for milk. It's like having free advertising. Now what if you found a way to somehow get to the milk without walking through the rest of the store. Do they have the right to complain?
I also notice that the Dallas Morning News has no robots.txt. That guarantees that search engines will deep link to their site. Again, the plaintiff failed to mitigate.
Miko O'Sullivan
If you remember that Belo Corp. was a major investor in the whole CueCat scheme you will quickly realize that the cluelessness of this corporation knows no bounds. I pity the foo's in Dallas who have to rely on these people for news (Dallas Morning News and WFAA Channel 8 are both Belo subsidiaries.)
Step 1: Litter your site with ads.
Step 2: Send some poor schmoe a
'cease and desist' letter, or post some really heinous privacy policy, or claim some really interesting or bogus technical innovation, or do anything else you can think of to get your site mentioned on Slashdot.
Step 3: Sit back and smile as the hit counter rockets skyward and advertising revenue rolls in!
Next week Time Magazine will require you to read pages 1-36 before reading the article you want on page 37. Don't complain, it's their copyright ;)
Rather, they'll sue requiring you to read the ADS before you read the articles. And NBC is going to sue to install a video camera on your TV to verify that you aren't going to the bathroom during the commercials...
That's what this is about. They don't want you skipping the ads on the homepage and going straight to the article you are interested in. And notice that they aren't harassing Google, but some tiny company few people ever heard of...
Now, there are a number of sites out there where deep links just don't work. I am no webmaster and I don't know the details, but since your browser sends the site you are coming from, it doesn't take a genius to check this and re-direct to the home page. This sucks in many ways (you can't cite an article and be sure your readers can find it on badly organized websites -- strangely, those who can organize their sites well don't often feel this compulsion to block deep links -- and you can't even bookmark it and go back to it later yourself without navigating the damned site), but if they really want to block deep links, it's much cheaper and more effective than hiring lawyers.
So what does Belo do instead? They sue someone for including in his site a text string following internet standards, which can be sent to their server to ask it to call up an article directly. No one is _making_ their server dish up these articles. So what's their claim -- an internet standard string format _tricks_ them into violating their own copyright? B.S. Maybe even barratry. They should pay Barking Dog's legal fees, court costs, and get beaten with the clue stick...
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,35306,00 . tml
This one has been sticking in the back of my mind since i first read it. Id expect that texas is in a different US federal district. So if that districts decides differntly its on the fast track for the SCotUS.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Are the courts braindead or what?
I mean:
I mean, damn, do the courts and lawyers need to get involved because you can't configure your HTTP server?
I don't know if this has been mentioned previously, I don't have the time to read through 377 comments ; ) but Belo's websites have some of the shoddiest methods of checking if you are registered to read their content. Just try these two (Belo likes to ask you to sign in to read local news): dallasnews.com and texas cable news All you have to do is turn off JavaScript and you can bypass all of their mechanisms to deny unregistered readers. This proves quite helpful, since their registration form is even more onerous than the NY Times. Their reg form wants your first and last name and even your address! The numbskulls who run their sites must not realize this, because I've been using this method for months.
There might be a way of getting this to pass the legal system. I know of all the technical solutions, but there might also be a legal solution to making deep linking a copyright violation.
Consider a site which makes the link text consist of the full text of the linked article, maybe even a data link that is the article itself. In that case, the link is the article, and therefore the link text itself is substatial enough to be copyrighted, thus cannot be posted on a website.
What do you think?
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Don't DVD movies force you to watch things at the beginning?
Some do. This is, as others have pointed out, a legitimate technological solution. As the other replies to your question show, it also pisses off users.
My
Actually, no. They do not. Copyright holders can not control distribution of their content. But they can control production, or copying of their content... to an extent. Even that is limited by fair use.
One can quickly find references to this from other IP industries. Specifically, book publishing and music publishing. Both have complained bitterly over the practice of second-hand resellers of books and CDs. Revenue is generated on the first sale of these products. However, the publisher (and author/artist) does not receive additional revenue on further sales. Even when these sales compete directly with sales of items still in print / production.
But as much as the industry and copyright holders dislike this situation - there is nothing they can do about it. It is legal. They do not have control over distribution of these copyrighted works. And second-hand / used sales continue.
In comparison, these industries are constantly bringing down businesses who produce these works illegally (ie: "pirated" products).
This seems to be the Shetland Times case all over again, which was settled rather than fought to the bitter end. The line between fair use and ripoff may be hard to define, but is worth doing if we want reporters and editors to do the work we value.
When I went to this page on the dallas news website and clicked on the link titled "Movies" I was taken to a "deep link" on the GuideLive.com website (well it ain't the front page).
Guess what -- it looks as if GuideLive.com doesn't want the Dallas News liking to that page -- "The page you requested could not be found."
Ha bloody ha!
You can't say it is ok for the New York Times to reference your articles but it isn't ok for BarkingDogs.com. (This is in response to their "we pick and choose who we sue.")
Also, there are a lot of precedents for newspapers not having a lot of say in what happens to their newspapers once sold. These should be applied to the website as well. Since the newspaper is basically putting their information out there to "sell" papers. (ie: If they really didn't want someone deep linking then all they have to do is to require a password/account (to show they are trying to not let anyone but people who pay see the information) or, as in the physical world, they could zip the entire newspaper up and then sell copies of the file. If the information is just out there without protection then it is the same as public information broadcast over the airwaves. Anyone can watch it or leave it alone and the TV stations can not force you to watch the commercials anymore than a newpaper can the ads.)
Last, but not least, as others have pointed out; you are not required to read or even look at the ads. Nor do newspapers have the right to ask this of the people who come to their sites.
This is (IMHO) simply an issue of a fedualistic outlook to an modern technology. Or to put that in another way: They are like little kids screaming "Mommy! Mommy! He touched me!" When they really should be going "Hmmm, if I just put an IF statement into my server looking for a request by BarkingDogs.com, then I can send them ads as well as the text." But that's only if they used their heads instead of lawyers.
The copyright holders can control the distribution of their copyrighted works but nothing in the copyright law gives them the right to control how their works are used. The website owner has no legal right to require the visitors to always go through the home page, just like your cable company has no right to require that you watch all the commercials. That should be a duh issue to anyone remotely familiar with copyrights.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Friggin set the web server to go to the main index page if the previous page wasn't on the same server.
It's not like it's rocket science to make it do that!
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
This COULDN'T mean that Slashdot would have to post ORIGINAL content, would it?? Nahhh. Plus, I think I'd puke at the spelling.
"Today, Slahsdot will begin to pist original kontent."
Agh.
:),
--j
What type of news media would NOT want links to their site? Are these guys morons? I thought more eyeball meant more revenue. Come on Dallas News....Wake up.....DUH!
The first thing I do when I run into a site with obfuscated URLs such as those you suggest... is leave.
1) I don't use javascript.
2) I am reluctant to follow a link that I can't see where goes -- gods know what it does.
3) Obfuscated content is seldom worth my time in any case.
As to deep linking vs. linking only to the base page -- that's like "I refer you to the 3rd paragraph on page 1294 in Zen's GREATWORKS" vs. "I refer you to Zen's GREATWORKS". The former is useful; the latter requires that I root thru the entire book [site] to find the reference.
Aside from the fact that this doesn't even touch the issue of copyright in the first place, who has time for that??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The funny thing is, the Dallas Morning News web site once deep linked to a page on my web site (http://glasssteelandstone.com). Anyone want to help pay for my lawsuit against Belo?
That is fucking rich
I am truely impressed here
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
After reading the article, I decided to send an email to the Dallas Morning News' general manager. It really infuriates me when companies insist on using lawyers to solve a purely technological problem:
0 0.html) about your parent company's stance on deep linking, I must say that I as ashamed to be from Dallas. Why does the newspaper insist on using lawyers to solve a purely technological problem?
Dear Mr. Barker,
Up until today, I have always been proud to be a native Texan from the Dallas area. After reading an article recently in Wired (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52213,
It is a quite simple matter to set a web server to only serve pages that have a valid "Http-Referrer" header -- every request sent by a browser sends this header, which contains that address of the page where the link was located. If it wasn't from your site, simply refuse the request. Technologically easy. No lawyers.
But if your intention is to simply harrass someone, which it must be since you opted for the more expensive option of litigation rather than the cheaper and more effective technological route.
sincerely,
Jay A. Key
So don't link them. At all. Ever. Leave them
net.dead.
It's a WORLD WIDE WEB of documents, linked by hyperlinks. WTF were they expecting?
They can use techniques to prevent people from linking to their stories, but then they would also prevent search engines from doing their work.
This is truely a farce. The problem is the judges in this country don't understand this shit. They don't understand this is a new world. They only understand the old storefront walk in the door then go pick out your book style that everything used to be like.
Nowadays, you can jump from page 36 of Time to page 99 of Slashdot to your favorite porn site. This is the beauty of the web. People who don't realize this and try to be stupid for the sake of profit and profit alone are retards.
That's it, I said it. They are retards. Don't worry, one day all the old and stupid people will die (hopefully of natural causes) and then we won't have to worry about them any more.
Cheers!
Cool! Amazing Toys.
a more pertinent example: i did not, in the course of my doctoral thesis, have to write off to the n authors whose works i consulted asking their permission to be referred to in my work. for material i quoted, above a certain length (and yes, there are international rules on this, something like 10% of an article, or similar), sure, THEN i did have to.
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
Terms of service or usage is not copyright. It is what the whiners at Belo WISH would happen. Belo is run by a bunch of pussies anyway.
:)
hawk
just design your site so people can only view pages by following links inside the site. Why is litigation always the first avenue pursued?
if you wanted to stop this they could redirect anything that a referred to their site to their homepage? unless it had no referrer and then they could let it though (to assume it was some non webbased email)
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Check the "referer" field of the http request.
If it exists and is not in their domain, redirect to their front page.
Easy.
No litigation required.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I'm not anonymous. My name is Randy Carnes and I live in Dallas Texas.
Barking Dog is full of shit. I called the paper myself, just now. The whole "deep linking" argument is mute. The problem Chris, the web editor, and Belo have is that Barking fucknut cannot refrain from CUTTING AND PASTING text directly from Dallas Morning News onto his website. That's why they're not attacking Dallasarena.com or Ronkirk.com. You CANNOT cut and paste text from the content of a story. That IS copyright infringement. If BarkingDork was only hyperlinking, Belo would have never bothered with him.
As a Dallas resident, I read BOTH websites daily. I've seen BD past text directly into his articles form DMN. I've read all the smack he talks about the Dallas Morning News on 3 days a week and then seen the copyright infringement on the other 2 days.
The guy is basically a laid off, nosy, busybody that inserts himself into ANYTHING that goes on down in the Lower Greenville area.
The economy is in the shitter. People are clutching at anything to stay employed. Businessmen are desperately trying to keep their doors open. He does NOTHING but try to hurt the area of bars and clubs that he moved into.
I myself wrote him one time, mostly as a joke, to basically garner a response to his actions. He called back to my company, got my boss's email address, and accused me of death threats. He was trying his damndest to get me fired! I didn't write anything in there that was remotely close to a death threat. My boss goes "I don't know who this guy is, but he's trying to get you fired. He's trying to say you threatened his life, but I don't see anything you said in that mail that was wrong. It WAS wrong, however, for you to use the company e-mail system to mail to him. Never do this again." I actually wrote an apology to him and CC'd my boss. I did this just to be an upstanding guy.
If you mention the name Avi Adleman in Dallas, people will look at you like you picked up their baby and farted on it. A small group of neighborhood busybodies and "net activists" are down with him, but that's it. I've got loads of friends that own houses in the neighborhood. They hate him.
He cruises around looking over fences as if he's code enforcement. You would not like to be his neighbor. You would definately not like him if you were a small businessman trying to make a tavern happen while he does his best to shut you down.
Sorry, but when I saw this crap, I had to interject some truth.
Please e-mail me at randycarnes@hotmail.com if you have questions, comments, or want to go fisticuffs in the parking lot. I stand by my words as the truth.
Randy Carnes
The Dallas Morning News' legal department might want to look into the precadent that was already set with the case of Tickets.com vs. Ticketmaster.
:6 ,00 . tml
The judge ruled that deep linking was NOT an infringement of copyright.
The Wired article is deep linked here
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,3530
Neat solution.
Only it won't work.
Y'see, the referer field is not compulsory, and some (many) browsers can be configured NOT to send it.
Some people choose to do this for privacy reasons.
So, under your scheme, such people would NEVER get to read any of the rest of the site, even if they enter from the main page.
Not so easy, when you THINK about it, is it.
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.