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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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
Yes, and the web is a hyperlinked medium. If they don't want their copy linked, they shouldn't use the web. A skywriter can't write a poem and sue anybody who looks up, and a mystery book author can't file charges because someone just skipped to the end to see who did it.
And it's copyright, not copy write.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
From the article: "When someone provides a link without my permission, which grants a user access to a part of my website without going first to my site's home page, the user may experience something different from what I intended when I established my website," Bruce Sunstein, an intellectual property law attorney, said.
If I read a book backwards, I will have an exerience other than what the author intended. Have I infringed his copyright? No.
If I play a LP at 45 rpm instead of 33 1/3 rpm, I will have a different experience than what the publisher and recording artist intended. Have I infringed their copyright? No.
If I set fire to a piece of sheet music instead of placing it on my music stand, I will have a different experience of the work than if I had used it as the publisher intended. But have I infringed anyone's copyright? No.
If I read a website with a text-to-speech converter (assuming there's plaintext to read in the first place), I will have a different experience of the site than the publisher intended. Have I infringed his copyright? No.
I don't know what is wrong with these "intellectual property" people, but they are creating a new oxymoron, it seems to me. There is very little intellectualism discernable in intellectal property theory.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Amazingly, they do have that right. They choose not to use it. Linking has nothing to do with copyright - you don't alter or reinterpert content, so you aren't creating a derivative work. You certainly aren't duplicating it. Copyright does not, and cannot, apply. Thats just basic sense. If they want to enforce a certain style of presentation, let them do so - it's like printing a book, but claiming you can force people to read it backwards. You can't, if you want people to read it backwards, you print it backwards. If you don't want people linking to content, make it impossible to do. This can be done trivially by not posting it on the web.
This technique is to be considered as highly antisocial, as it not only forbids deep linking, but also forces the user to enable javascript. Many users have disabled javascript for security reasons (obnoxious popus, cross-site scripting, etc.), while others may use a browser that does not support javascript, either by choice, or by necessity (blind users surfing with a braille line must use a text-only browser). Moreover, if you push javascript too much, it may well only run correctly in one single browser (the one you developped/tested it in), ruining all portability of Html (and if you don't push it overly, then it will not be obfuscated enough to truely hide the URL). By using such techniques, you'll be perceived as a moron who does this in order to force users to use Internet Explorer, rather than as somebody who wants to protect your deep links.
with a layer of crypto thrown in just to make analysis of the interpreted bytecode more difficult. (The crypto decode key must be part of what is downloaded, so this doesn't defeat analysys, just complicates it.)
Actually, such techniques can be defeated even without analysis: just run a sniffer and log the URL's that your browser tries to access. You'd be inconveniencing the legitimate user without really impeding a determined attacker.
You're earlyer suggestions (session ids or timestamps embedded in URLs) are much more user friendly.
Say no to software patents.
...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!