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."
There is a simple way to keep people from linking to your site, just find your webserver, and unplug the network connection. And next week, we talk about people who hang signs in their window, but don't want people looking at them.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Law.com was surprised that their website had a policy that they and their lawyers had ccoked up restricting linking? Why were they surprised? Did this policy get published by little policy fairies in the middle of the night without law.com's knowledge or consent.
Puhlease!
First if you don't want people linking to your site at all, you are just an idiot and shouldn't be allowed to have a website at all.
r y-URL-For.
But secondly, and this is usually mentioned when this comes up, but I'll say it again.
If you don't want people deep linking into your site, put some sort of CGI in place. Either with refer checking, cookies, or a server side stateful mechinism that tracks a visitors progress through the site. The first two can be defeated if someone really wants in, but will stop most linking.
But this is just stupid anyway. If people weren't ment to link between sites it would have been called the World Wide Line, or the World Wide Collection-of-Sites-that-You-Have-to-Remember-Eve
is why they're trying legal (as in using the law) approaches to technical problems, something that normally cannot be done. Technical problems need technical solutions.
In this case - checking referrer tags in http requests and blocking them as appropriate instead of litigating the defendant into removing a link.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
This is almost as good as going against someone who buys their ink by the barrel.
Lets see, 1 law professor, 20 students needed project for class. Hmmmm.....
Fight Spammers!
What i don't understand is how people can get up-in-arms when organizations attempt to prevent people from linking to their site, yet at the same time lament the increase of spam in their inboxes.
It seems to me that three of the linchpins of the arguments for, say, making spam illegal are 1) the email was unsolicited, 2) the spam potentially interferes with "legitimate" emails, and 3) the downloading of spam can force the recipient to incur costs he did not intend to.
These arguments can be made for unsolicited/unapproved deep-or-otherwise- linking. Often links to websites - and the manner in which they are linked - imply a relationship or endorsement of a website that an organization might not accept. Unauthorized links to websites can interfere with normal traffic to that website, at times bringing such services down, - as surely users of Slashdot know. And moreover, unauthorized links - again, as from Slashdot - can force users to incur not-insubstantial bandwidth costs.
So from this analysis, if making spam illegal is a desirable goal - and it seems to be from the cheers here whenever charges are pressed against spammers - then I think it's difficult to simultaneously rationalize and argument against companies' attempts to control linkage to their sites.
Don't Link to Us! links to sites that attempt to impose substantial restrictions on other sites that link to them. The Linking Policy for Don't Link to Us! precludes us from requesting permission to link to a site, and compels us to link directly to the targeted page (i.e., a "deep link") rather than to a site's home page. Descriptions of sites' linking policies generally are accurate (though often not complete) at the time they are posted here but are likely to change over time. On occasion a web site will modify its linking policy in response to public ridicule. Perhaps their appearance in Don't Link to Us! will help encourage some of these sites to move forward into the 20th century.
Rock on, dude.
--Jim
Requiring people to get permission before citing sources in bibliographies?
The point isn't to send the people away who, through no fault of their own, don't arrive by the front door. The point is to convert them to your own customers.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
If somebody links to you in a derogatory -- but not libelous -- way, that's a bummer, but it's legal. Hey, you can always do the same back to them. :-)
I agree that the polices mentioned seem daft and unenforcable. However it seems to me that if companies wish to implement restrictive linking policies, then they shuld be able to do this in a more automated way. One approach could be an Apache module which implemented policies on linking, based on the referrer field. I guess many people would probably want this type of facility to stop people linking directly to images on your Web site (e.g. stealing your identity by taking your logo). We're likely to see more need as technologies such as XLink and XPpointer take off - I want to link to your page, but I don't want the logo or the copyright statement at the bottom of the page!. Brian Kelly
Aren't Netscape bookmarks just hyperlinks stored in a file called bookmark.htm? Does this mean we have to obtain permission to create a bookmark to any of these sites?
All along, I've been trying to promote my site by encouraging people to link to it. Now I see. If I just forbid people to link to my site I will get some links to it. Yes!
I seem to have read in more than one place recently that empirical evidence suggests that linking to your site, especially from other highly linked/ranked sites is a major factor in Googles ranking for search results. Thus if people actually respect these sites wish's they will eliminate themsleves from the HTTP gene pool.....
Do these sites think that people will just randomly type in their address without searching for it? You know they're going to search engines, and they'll link to the site...and that violates their asinine policy.
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
Once again, western ideals here folks. Lots of sites in Japan have very explict no linking policies, and it is considered perfectly polite to make such requests (and down right rude to not obey them!)
/is/ rather st00pid, the fact is that:
/sueing/ over such issues is rather stupid, but if some site sends you a 'please take down your link to our site' letter then hey, it IS their site. They where actualy nice enough to warn you, they could have just shoved up a HTTP referer block and said screw you to your content. (admitedly many of the idiot admins who do the cease and desist letters are to stupid to figure out how to do such but. . . . heh)
While I will admit that commerical sites with no linking policies
The site belongs to the owner
The owner is paying for bandwidth and hosting
The owner can invite who ever they want on to their site.
Now granted
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