You Can't Link Here

An anonymous reader writes "Last year several news sources reported about the website dontlink.com from David Sorkin, associate professor of law at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago. His website fights 'stupid linking policies' that attempt to impose restrictions on other sites that link to them. Now a German law student joined the fight against linking restrictions and starts getting media attention in Germany. His list of stupid German linking policies can be found at the website Links & Law. Contrary to the model of dontlink.com, the German site refrains from linking to companies that prohibit linking without their consent. The site only states the URL of the websites with the linking policies. The page with the linking policies is in German, but the rest of the website is in English and covers many legal aspects of linking."

Comments

taboo links

[asscroft]

www.kpmg.com

silly bastards, if they don't want to be linked, they shouldn't have a web page. They should invent thier own non-http protocol that doesn't allow linking, or more importantly, allows restriction of linking. As long as their using our protocol, they have to play by our rules.

nah nah nah naaaah naaaahh

Where would /. be without cross linking?

[teutonic_leech]

I wonder if anyone at /. has considered the implications of restricting cross linking. It's really sad what the Internet is being relegated into. Not do we all have to battle spam, pop-ups (pop-unders), banners and other type of promotions, reducing the average site's visible editorial content down to less than 50% ... P2P is being curtailed of course and cross linking might be illegal at some point or might be so restricted that forums such as /. might risk a law suit or an injunction every time it adds a story.

Is that really what we all envisioned the Web would turn into? It's just further proof that powers in charge do not consider us to be individuals with an intellect but just as simple-minded consumers who must be herded towards maximum profit margin. Sorry for sounding so disenchanted, but when I remember the 'old' Web - I find it just disgusting what this is all turning into...

Big Hairy Deal...

[jdreed1024]

Why do so many /.ers get their panties in a twist over this issue? Site $foo doesn't want you to link to them - so the fuck what? Were you _really_ going to link to them anyway? Really? It seems like people go out of their way to find sites with restrictive linking policies, just so they can get everyone all steamed up about it.

I know this whole post sounds like a troll, but really, I'm curious - how often have you desperately wanted to link to a site, yet found out you couldn't because of restrictive linking policies.

Also, here's another serious question. Say I publish a cool Lego Mindstorm project on my website, with a bunch of JPEGs. I'm hosted via a cable modem, so if I exceed a certain amount of bandwidth, I'm SOL and have to pay more money. Some guy finds my website, and submits it to Slashdot. Suddenly, my traffic spikes, and I'm over my monthly limit in just 24 hours. Is that fair?

Yes, you can say "You shouldn't have put up the page if you didn't want people to see it", but do you, honestly, every time you put up a website, anticipate that it will be /.ed? No, of course you don't. So now, this huge traffic spike costs me real money. I have two choices: a) Create a linking policy; b) Remove my content. Chances are I'll choose (b), since I know /.ers will thumb their noses at (a). So now, the web has lost some content, and nobody benefits.

You want to say linking policies are stupid? Fine. Want to say they're useless? Fine. That's well within your rights. But what do you propose sites do to combat the /. effect?