Blogspace vs. NPR

jonkl writes "National Public Radio's linking policy at npr.org has caused a fuss within the blog community that's hot and getting hotter. The policy's simply stated in two sentences: 'Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. If you would like to link to NPR from your Web site, please fill out the link permission request form.' This is buried, of course, in a page linked to the site's footer, but somebody noticed and mentioned it to Howard Rheingold, who passed it on to Cory Doctorow of boingboing.net. Cory wrote scathing commentary, calling the policy 'brutally stupid,' even 'fatally stupid.' The outrage is spreading; this has to be a rough day for the NPR ombudsman who's deluged with email by now... ~24 hours after Cory's report." Reminds of the KPMG policy.

Comments

Well, part of the reason...

[melquiades]

I used to work for a regional public radio network's web shop, and we had some contact with NPR. They are a fairly slow-moving, bureaucratic organization -- partly because they are controversial and always under attack, and partly because their board of directors is made up of their several hundred member stations. For both these reasons, they tend to be a bit overprotective.

However, they're not completely backwards or out of touch with the web -- not by a long shot. They were online before most companies realized it was important, and were one of the first major media outlets to start giving all their content away -- free! -- online.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the stupid policy in question was penned by some lawyer in the early days of the web, when the answers to these questions were a lot less clear.

Hopefully this exposure will wake them up, and get their policy re-grounded in reality.

Re:Well, part of the reason...

[gclef]

Actually (I used to work for NPR, too), not all that much of their funding comes from the gov't. The majority of their money comes from contributions and the "funded-by" bites. The gov't still contributes a noticable chunk, but it's about 10-20%, IIRC, not the majority.

Of course, I worked at the central office in DC...I don't know what the funding situation was like for individual stations.

watchingyou?

[sys49152]

For no good reason I viewed the source of the permission form. Ironically, the form's action tag is: http://iris.npr.org/cgi-bin/watchingyou.pl

Not only that, but the high-tech folks at NPR use this form to generate an email. The recipients are listed in a hidden field on the form. So if you want to give the ombudsman a break, you can send your thoughts directly to the people who evaluate the link requests: jrichards@npr.org, bmelzer@npr.org, nprhelp@npr.org, tholzman@npr.org.

Link me, but don't frame me.

[TheFlu]

I have no problems with linking to my site from anywhere, but when other sites frame my site and try to present my information as their own, I don't particularly enjoy that. Here's how you can prevent "framing":

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
if (self.location.href != top.location.href) {
top.location.href = self.location.href;
}
// -->
</script>

Re:Link me, but don't frame me.

[Reziac]

Side effect: anti-framing scripts will sometimes crash browsers (even with javascript disabled!) on YOUR site, preventing them from reading YOUR content entirely.

Better might be to plainly label each of your pages, so even if they wind up framed elsewhere, it's obvious whose material it is.

Re: That's not entirely true

[nohup]

"It's a basic right for someone to be able to publish publically available information, such as a universal resource locator."

That's not entirely true. There have actually been court cases where they have ruled that linking to a URL can be infringing. Some of these include Starbucks, Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, and US Intellectual Reserve Inc vs. Utah Lighthouse Ministry Inc. Here's a good article about the topic.