"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 ;)

Comments

email to a friend

[geekoid]

I can't deep link to an article, but I can email it to a friend?

Their copyright?

[drsoran]

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.

Re:Their copyright?

[fishebulb]

not really, its more like saying hey, go get a time magazine and read page 37

The website never copied the article to its own servers. that is key in this case.

you are only directing someone to a news article

Criminal Incompetence.

[Circuit Breaker]

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.

Technical Solution

[DeadSea]

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.

Re:Technical Solution

[ReelOddeeo]

There are other technical solutions.

You could use an expiring url. That is, encrypt an expiration timestamp into the url. Now, your main page could have links which work, for an hour, into stories in your site. But if you bookmarked those links and use them after they expire, then those expired links simply give you back the main page again. Suppose you use 3DES to encrypt the expiration timestamp, you just keep the key private. Since only your server knows the key, only you can decrypt it. Or use other crypto.

Another possibility is through the use of sessions. Some web systems keep track of you by a "session", such as a shopping site might need to do. Within the session, links to stories within the site have the session id (or some function thereof) embedded into the url. Once the session has expired, or the user has logged out of the site, or even closes their browser window, the old links no longer would work.

Other techniques could be used with varying degrees of success. Instead of sending a <a href="story382728.html"> tag, send some javascript which is heaviliy obfuscated, but which eventually writes into the document the actual link. All kinds of code obfuscation techniques could be used, including implementing a small code interpreter with the actual code to write the url written in the interpreted code, 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.)

Other techniques include a challenge/response system implemented in Javascript. If they're on your main page, then clicking on the link to the story, creates a hidden layer (or frame) and sends a tiny <form> to the server with variables requesting a challenge. The script on the server generates some challenge code. The javascript computes a response and encodes the response into the url link to the story. Now the difficulty here is that you must hit some other magic url via. a form with hidden variables and a POST request in order to obtain the challenge code, before you compute a response to it to include into the url. The story links could expire fairly quickly so that the Javascript code has only 60 seconds to compute and hit the url with the correct response code before it expires. This makes it very difficult to try to even hit the story using netcat connected to port 80 of the server. Again, you would have to analyze the javascript code.

I'm sure I could think of other techniques if I thought about it longer than it took to write this message.

Re:Technical Solution

[BlueUnderwear]

Other techniques could be used with varying degrees of success. Instead of sending a <a href="story382728.html"> tag, send some javascript which is heaviliy obfuscated, but which eventually writes into the document the actual link. All kinds of code obfuscation techniques could be used, including implementing a small code interpreter with the actual code to write the url written in the interpreted code,...

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.

obligitory

[jeffy124]

oops

i think i just broke (c) law. aaaah!

Does this mean the end of google?

[eaddict]

Don't all the search engines 'deep link'? I guess the new search engines will only point to home pages. What a crock!

What about Google, Altavista, Lycos, etc...

[toupsie]

It seems that major search engines are the biggest "violators" of deep linking. Majority of the time when I do a search, I am not given the home page of the site that has the information I want, I am given a "deep link" to the exact page I need. Maybe the Dallas News is playing favorites over who can link to their "deep pages".

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.

Re:Being on the web does not remove copy write.

[JabberWokky]

As much as I dislike it, the owners of the copy write do control the distribution of their intellectual property.

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

Re:Its surprising

[kindbud]

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.

BarkingDogs' answer to BELO

[kindbud]

Here it is, enjoy!

Tim Berners-Lee

[discHead]

"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

Re:Nobody said that

[arkanes]

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.

The Link Controversy Page

[mutende]

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.

In Other News...

[Mockura]

Comcast Cable has sent cease and desist letters to Sony, Magnavox and other major television manufacturers, demanding removal of the number buttons on TV remotes.

"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!"

But a "home page" has no special status...

[dpbsmith]

...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?