Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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!!