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Restrictive Linking Policies & The Net
Masem writes "News.com reports on a new site set up by Prof. David Sorkin of the John Marshall Law School that points out web sites with restrictive linking policies, entitled Don't Link To Us. Sorkin set up the site as a way to enlighten net users on the impact of such policies in the aftermath of past and pending court cases over deep linking policies. An owner of one site on the list, law.com, was suprised to discover that their site has a restrictive linking policy, and already plans to implement changes to it."
I hope all these nancies who publish stuff on the web but don't want it linked to have set-up robots.txt appropriately.
There isn't much difference between a website linking to you, and a result page of a search engine.
For the unitiated, robots.txt is a text file you can place in the root directory of your web site that advises search engines not to index various parts of your site. More info at http://www.robotstxt.org/
Indeed. Any webserver lets you do this with relative ease. Don't allow any referrer other than your own site. Redirect all referred hits to /index.html or whatever. But for the love of $deity, stop trying to legislate things that have absolutely no reason to be legislated.
do not read this line twice.
ASCAP! The mafia that controls music. There's a great story at wired about travelfinder.com's links to radio stations.
ASCAP wanted them to fork over royalty fees even though the music wasn't archived on their site! The links were clearly denoted as external.
Then again this isn't suprising behavior considering that ASCAP tried to strongarm the girl scouts into paying royalties for songs sung around the campfire.
So not only does the search engine link to it, but because of the way a search engine works it has to copy the content for indexing. That's not even mentioning google's cache. I would love to see some of these tried in court (but not the US court; it's too risky.)
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Well, there is a simple solution... if you run a web site and don't want links to yours, use Apache and install mod_rewrite. Then it's a simple matter of defining rewrite rules in your base .htaccess file that check the HTTP_REFERER value - if your own domain (or any authorized domain you wish to define) is not in your list, the user can either be redirected to your home page (stop deep linking only) or to a "don't link to us" page, or direct to a 403:
/image_directory.* [NC] .*\.jpg /graphics/linked.gif
Hree's my favorite - created for a friend who didn't want folks including her images in their siges by link:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://foo\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}
RewriteRule
This one should just give the bugger a 403 if they link directly to anything on your site - might have to add exclusionary logic for the home page to avoid locking everyone out.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://foo\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [F]
The Digital Sorceress
Just find your webserver and configure it to check the referer field and enforce your policy. If it means enough to you to have a policy (and sue), why not enforce it? This was brought up during some of these court cases. To me, that should have reduced any damage claims to zero, but it didn't.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!