Slashdot Mirror
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."
These companies probably don't allow linking because they are afraid of a slashdotting.
More Stupid rules/laws can be found here.
The fact of the matter is that it's impossible to hold any but the largest of businesses to such a silly policy. If they really don't want people to link to their stuff, don't put it where the public can get to it.
It's that simple.
Nehmen die Plakate viel der Drogen kürzlich? Mit allem passenden Respekt uns ist zu informieren über jemand anderes, das bereits erfolgtes etwas tut - auf Deutsch nichtsdestoweniger - nicht dieses germane. Ich würde nicht sein, also störte, wenn ich nicht mehrere meiner eigenen Unterordnungen - die gute - zusammenfassend vor kurzem zurückgewiesen gesehen hatte.
If this has already been posted, please mod /. as slower than poo. If not, enjoy the whore.
Whore!
Maybe somebody has an underpowered server, or pays a high rate for bandwidth usage. Such people would prefer to avoid a /.ing that would kill their mission-critical machine or drive them into the poorhouse. That's a perfectly valid reason to deny other sites permission to link.
I fail to see why this is a free speech issue.
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
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
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...
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. (emphasis mine)
But perhaps they've changed their policies in the last 100 years??...
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
even mention not linking to them but has a dislcaimer to any third party links they post. Sorkin needs to proof read some of his stuff before posting it...I found numerous mistakes in his posts...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's can hardly be seen as hypocrisy when you consider the difference between your personal phone line and private residential address and a web site ostensibly for providing information to the public.
It gets even more silly to make this comparison when you look at how the WWW is intended to operate- the word "hypertext" isn't just fast words, it's about links. Requiring licenses to link is totally against the entire basis of the technology, and has been pointed out, patently absurd, as restrictions on linking are totally unenforceable in any meaningful sense.
How does the linker not get caught? Just add this to the web site:
--naked
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
No. By linking to a site, you're not bugging the owner of the site (short of using a little bandwidth).
If you don't want people to read/obtain data on your web server, take it offline or put it behind some kind of access restriction. If it's a "public" web site, then I think the assumption should be that you want people to read it. The biggest difference is that for people to read your web site doesn't require your personal attention; you don't have to answer every HTTP/GET request individually, but you do have to answer your phone or let the machine get it.
huh? ever heard of slashdotting?
Perhaps the solution to all this nonsense is to get the browser publishers to get together and tell all the webmasters (via press release or what have you) that if they don't stop pissing on the entire PURPOSE of the web, that the referrer functionality will be removed from the browsers, and then they'll NEVER know where their visitors are coming from.
It's obvious these jackasses don't know their asses from their elbows when it comes to their asses and elbows, let alone how "teh Intarweb" works. They're not going to listen to reason, so just give them an ultimatum they can't ignore.
What all you hippie leeches forget is that life is a bit different when you have a personal collection of value-added URIs to be publishing, such as a photo gallery, for example.
At the very least, think before you say "deep linking". Do you mean only an href to a URI whose delivered Content-Type is text/html or text/plain?
Or do you mean to include img src to URIs whose delivered type is image/* as well?
Allowing the latter willy-nilly still comes under *my* idea of "deep linking", and it brings with it responsibility. Not only might my wishes be different to your ideals, but *I*'ve got the costs of bandwidth to be considering, and *I* reserve the right to move / rename / remove the destinations of the links, thereby making *your* pages look crap to everyone else.
Not to mention, sensible people block images coming from different servers to the referring page in the name of blocking adverts, so that won't work reliably anyway.
Now. What exactly do you all mean by "deep linking" and how do you propose measuring and contributing to content providers' bandwidth costs?
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
that is the root of the problem, if you connect to a public resource is your website truly private ? I can see both sides, but the physical analogy falls short in this case. There is NO PHYSICAL presence, hence NO TRESPASS, so if you failed to take the rudimentary steps such and POST A NO TRESPASSING sign(login or legal disclaimer), then I think actually the problem does rest on your shoulders.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Those damned hippie leeches. I put a 600-foot-tall statue of Keynes in the middle of a public square, intending to charge $100 a head to view it. But those friggin' hippies went and told people where it was! My whole business plan was based on nobody finding that out! Now how am I supposed to recoup the cost of building that statue?
>>It's not completely unenforceable. You just need to look at yer HTTP_REFERER log to see who is linking to you. Then you just bring up their site, print it out, and take it to the judge.
And then the Judge says "show me where they agreed not to link to you" and throws the guy out of the court room.
HTTP_REFERER can be faked, or unused. It cannot be trusted.
Seriously if you dont want deep linkers just use flash or use some other worthlessly NON-Navigable page designs
Hrmm... with a few mod rewrite rules any site that doesnt wish to be linked to can redirect the request.
If they don't want links from a certain site just add another rule, if you don't want people accessing the site put a firewall up or password protect it. This silly business of linking laws is akin to me preventing people from making references to my businesses location. Or a grocery store owner preventing me from telling someone that the grocery store has Peanut Butter in isle 12.
I think people really need to grow up, anything I don't want linked to I password or otherwise protect.
Personally, I'd like to know what you would think if people started linking to unprotected SMB content.
Kuro5hin has a very insightfull article about the ethics of linkage.
Check this out
Some people just don't get what the web is about.
...
An example: A web site at a university that hosted previous exam papers as PDF documents. This was available to everyone in the World until some Professor thought that this was a bad thing because some other schools might "copy" courses by studying the old exam questions.
So now, it is restricted to on-campus IPs. ANYONE could just forward the documents on though and ANYONE can just come into a library and photocopy the exam papers. Dear god.
They want to publish but not hang the dirty laundry out
I don't get it. Why do they even have linking policies. A simple few lines of code in the top of the page could check the referrer and if it was from "outside" then redirect them. Problem solved.
You can also so do this for frames with javascript. A few lines would check to see if the page was in a frame and if it was it moves out of the frame.
I have implemented both these solutions. I am so sick of threats in policies and EULAs. If you dont want people coming into your house just lock freaking the door. Simple as that.
No.
The equivalent to requiring explicit permission before emailing me would be requiring explicit permission before VISITING my website.
Linking to a website is a pointer. It is akin to posting a mailto: link - which while generally causes your mailbox to be more likely to be spam harvested, does not actually result directly in anything appearing in your mailbox.
Why not simply put the destination site into every referrer you send? You'd be telling the site that you've already be there.
I can't think of any specific reason to do that, just a fun exercise.
That's not even what's going on. It's more like if a company welcomed people into its store, then threatened people with legal action if they told others the address of the store or the locations of specific items in the store.
As far as I am concerned, a link is like a card in a card catalog or a reference in a paper. It's just information about how to get someplace on the web, and nobody should be able to restrict another's dissemination of that information.
The DMCA--for corporations, the best copyright law money can buy.
comeback: There is in "win".
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
--yo, if any search engine doods are reading, please, take these websites' wishes to heart, don't have them show up in any of your searches! No links is "no links", give them what they want.
%^)>
that ought to sort things out better for the PHBs at these various webpages
If corporations don't like the idea of people hyper-linking they should use a different protocol then http. It's that simple--if you use the web then you agree to the concept of hyper-linking. It's a foundation of the technology.
If corporations find that http is too loose & free for their lawyers liking they can invent and use something else. They are trying to have it both ways--and in the process expropriate a public resource.
I don't think it's just about wanting to force people through all of your ads.
I can understand objecting to another site repeatedly linking to yours to the point of imitating your content without attribution, getting a free ride on both your content and server load. Heck, you could mimic the entire site. There must be copyright issues if you misrepresent ownership of the creative material, or use them beyond fair use. The Tickets.com case didn't resolve everything.
As for directing someone to a page, that seems very reasonable, especially because it's pretty hard to track down a page after the home page changes.
Also, just as a matter of politeness, I would want to respect the wishes of the site owner. But they should make their wishes clear, say in the HTML of the page. Doesn't the referrer tag make it pretty easy to police your oen pages against casual intrusion? Anyway, a liberal linking policy in more in the spirit of the internet; I hope site owners think twice before clamping down.
I think this is an extremely stupid law that says dont refer to me. They could extend it to "pointing a finger (any) at anyone is illegal". Suddenly referring to people in text also becomes illegal and so do all newspapers and history books.
"A certain somebody created 3 laws of Physics. A certain somebody else disproved him".
The real concept of illegal links is to enforce the reader to read everything from the home page and navigate to the point of information. They want to push popup ads and not have misconceptions by people who read only part of what the site has to say. But the solution is smarter design of websites..
Another reason why they do it is to have the person download files from their site after reading their text and possibly filling out their forms. Most sites have successfully achieved this by random subdirectories as in fileplanet.com. Companies with highly inept web maintainers are recommended to use laws rather than smart site designs to achieve their results. Since the tech world is economically down and skilled technicians commonly available, such companies are requested to quitely do a seach on dice.com and workopolis for resumes, and replace their System/Network Admins with people who can get the job done.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Stupidly wrong. The web is ALL about linking. If you don't want links, there is no acceptable way to rule them out, and no excuse for trying.
So you're saying that a prerequisite for posting anything to the web is that it can handle a worst-case slashdotting load? If that were true, ironically the only people who could afford to be on the web are the major corporations that the article is complaining about.
I agree that the situation should not be resolved by threat of legal action, whether empty or not. I'd like to see a linking etiquette, such as: if you manage a high volume site, don't link to geocities, and if in doubt, ask the site's admin whether it will be a problem, before you take his site down and bury him in excess bandwidth costs! How hard could that be? Is a little polite behaviour too much to ask for?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
there are several ways to block unwanted links to a server. you can prevent x-linking of pictures or detect a link from an other site with the http-referer.
l ">
;-)
BUT.
insead of linking directly to an other page you can use this:
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="1; url=http://www.forbidden.to/link/to/this/page.htm
this will generate no referer. or to put it differently, the referer looks the same as if it were a bookmark. ans if you would stop people from bookmarking your site you're really stupid
Privacy is terrorism.
From KPMGs dislcimaer:
The following web link activities are explicitly prohibited by KPMG and may present trademark and copyright infringement issues:
1- Links that involve unauthorized use of our logo
2- Framing, inline links or metatags
3- Hyperlinks or a form of link that disguises the URL and bypass the homepage
Seems OK to me.
1- You can't use their logo because it is trademarked. Doesn't mean you can't link to them.
2- Framing or online links - this has already been found illegal under "Passing Off" laws in the UK and many other states. No problem here.
3- Note the use of the word *and*. They'd like you to deep link, but only if your link shows the full URL. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Why exactly, is linking to KPMG taboo?
Did you really think this one through? If I put up a server (or even just a site on geocities) on the Web, that very act implies that I am soliciting traffic.
:)
/. against any idiot that tries to sue because of some stupid "linking policy".
If I were to send Alan Ralsky my email address and then complain about spam...THAT would be hypocrisy. But anyone putting a website on the World Wide Web is offering their site to...well, the world.
In deference to many posts below, I do believe that the "slashdot effect" is an unfortunate compliment to many unsuspecting websites. But I'll be the first to defend
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
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?
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
American Express doesn't really want no one linking to its site. From a marketing standpoint it's ludicrous to expect google to issue them a letter asking for permission to send potential credit card customers over. Rather, they want a basis on which to send a threatening, yet legally hollow, threat to the owner of a site that criticizes AmEx and does so with supporting hyperlinks.
For instance, it would be difficult to pick apart AmEx's Privacy Statement in its entirety without either linking to (linking policy violation), or reprinting it (copyright violation).
However, if you make a statement in your blog regarding how much you love their blue card and include a link to the application page, don't expect an ominous letter sent certified mail anytime soon.
The business section of my local (Minneapolis/St. Paul) phone book begins with a series of entries named "A", each with its own phone number.
Curious what business goes on at "A", my friend and I called one of the numbers.
We asked, "What do you do?"
The man at "A" replied: "I can't tell you that."
And I still don't know what they do at "A".
-kgj
I wonder if Slashdot posting this counts as a link to links to forbidden sites... That's probably supposed to be illegal too.
Taken as a whole, the Internet is the same way. Most resources available are private, they are not presumed to be public. However, just like signs indicate that a building is public, an Internet protocol can by convention be presumed public, such as HTTP. Most HTTP servers not behind firewalls are public. Placing restrictions on entry, such as password requirements, can act as a "sign" indicating that something is not unrestricted. That's why you don't have a right to go trying to randomly log into telnet servers and password-protected web sites.
I don't think these issues are particularly hard to figure out, but a lot of people seem to have trouble. That's because they often aren't taking common sense expectations into account and instead are arguing from strongly abstracted positions. The public/private building analogy is apt, because it forces one to think about why it is that it's pretty clear that you can't go walking into people's homes even though there's so many public buildings around. The same sort of common sense reasoning about where one has and doesn't have a right to wander in the real world applies in the virtual world.
In this particular issue, these sites that want to prohibit deep linking fail to make convicing arguments because a) they're not actually controlling access to these pages and so there's a presumption that they're fully public; and, b) the whole argument is moot because linking is only a pointer and is not access in any sense.
Say I want to dispel the myths of the Church of Scientology and wish to link to their sites to aid my argument? Do you think they would agree? Imagine what would happen to the web if these linking policies were legally enforceable. The Web would degenerate rapidly, new content would be stunted, and information as we know it could become as inaccessible as it was before the WWW.
No it's not really fair, but those are the risks. Slashdot bears a lot of responsibility and doesn't always make courteous decisions, but the onus is really on you to deal with whatever happens to your site. Apache has throttling software and there are plenty of hosts out there which wouldn't leave you with over-the-cap fees. The wrong thing to do would be attack a fundamental structure of the Internet. I mean, where would you draw the line anyway?
My answer would be c) Deal with it. There are ways to deal with a flood of traffic that won't leave you bankrupt or off the web for a month. There are ways to control access to your content as well. Posting content to the Internet is like putting a billboard on the Moon. Are you going to complain when the whole world looks?
Linking policies shouldn't be enforceable that's for sure. If you make it public that you don't want people to link you site or flood you with traffic then they ought to respect your wishes. But shit happens. So be prepared for it.
Thanks!
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Duh; referer can be used much more effectively to just break the damn link! Check the referer and if it's not yourself or an 'authorised' site, return a page saying deep linking isn't allowed. Or a 404. Or redirect them to goatse.cx. Sure, referer is easily dissabled, but not by the person doing the linking. 99% of web surfers will return the correct referer so for all practical purposes this approach completely kills deep linking.
To preventing framing there's a little javascript I've seen (somewhere; I didn't bookmark it) which checks if your're framed and reloads the page. I think you have to use javascript to open someone else's page in a frame anyhow; so either way you win.
You can tell all of the major search sites to not cache and/or not index your page in robots.txt. I'm not sure why any commercial site would want to be NOT indexed by search engines, but wtf.. if you want it you only have to ask!
It is utterly utterly STUPID to involve lawyers for something like this when there are such trivial technical solutions.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
I view any attempt to legally enforce a policy forbidding me to deep-link into a publicly accessable website as an infringement of my constitutional rights of free speech. and free press. Would there be any question about this if I were to address an audience and verbally (or by handout) give them the deep URL?
Ah, it would be nice if all browsers supported HTTP_REFERER...
BTW, I've always wondered if a /. editor created that environment variable.
- passion
There's also the matter of context. If you put something on a public web server, the context (the WWW) is a different one than your phone number, and the expectations surrounding it are different.
Also, there's a difference in the way you have to respond to such things. As pointed out elsewhere, answering phone calls, email, or door-to-door solicitors requires you to react, one-on-one, with the caller or visitor. HTTP servers don't work that way.
The context and expectations are not analogous to phones and/or your residential address. You have a reasonable expectation of privacy there. If you put something on a public HTTP server (public meaning accessible from the Internet without a password protection scheme or some other authorization setup) then you have provided that data to anyone who wishes to obtain it. If someone else links to your site in a way you don't like, tough; that's the way the protocol works.
You can place your resources behind an authorization scheme, you can accept the way things work, or you can take your resources offline. The Web may be a free-for-all in a lot of respects, but it does have some rules, if only by dint of the way the technology was designed to work.
It would be trivial to write a web-server rule to check the HTTP-REFERER and not display the page if it is being linked from outside the site... Of course, if you did this, you would lose out on th eexpense and bad press that you get from taking Joe's blog to court for linking directly to your order page for your product.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
There is nothing to stop them from suing you just to scare your ISP, or failing that, waste your time and money. Remember, they can stop you just as solidly with lawyer's fees and time wasted as they can with a court-backed injunction.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Okie, i reckon 90% of peoples bookmarks will be deep links. So that means bookmarks are illegal. If you want to take that to the next stage, you can look at a bookmark list as a Bibliography for a project or paper you are writing. As you are technically deep linking into journals, archives or librarys. So that would mean bibliographys are illegal (esp. As papers are more and more being handed in a pure digital format, with there bib's as hyperlinks). So why does every school /collage/uni insist on you writing illegal texts. When they jump on any illegal practice.
--+> Life, is there any?
Even if you get a caller id, you still have to react to each call. You have to get to the phone and either pick the phone up, or just let it ring (which quickly gets pretty annoying), or possibly press some kind of "reject" key. (don't know if such phones exist)
AS funny as this is it actually wouldn't work in court. You cant say "if you do **** then you owe us a million dollars". Many of these :you may not link to us you may not read this from a machine with a hard drive or a cd burner or any form of non-volatile memory. Its like if someone says "by stepping into my store you are required to buy $100 worth of something. There are many posted requirments that would be throw own. Many of these conditions have to be agreed to.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Don't link
Don't point
Don't recommend
Don't support
Don't save
Don't forward
Don't cite
Don't comment
Don't argue
Don't protest
Don't ask
Don't learn
Don't remember
Don't read
Don't look
Don't think!
Don't live!
Don't exist!
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
There are a couple of common mistakes in other replies to this thread:
1) the fact that you allow your website to exist is an implied license to allow for linking to your website, so linking _per se_ is not an issue, but the issue is the context of the link and whether it is misleading or inappropriate in some way (such as the link suggesting a false endorsement, or an untrue fact that is libelious, etc). It's entirely fair to allow a website to place _some_ _reasonable_ restrictions on how other websites can link to it, and it's entirely fair and appropriate to apply existing issues of fair dealing, passing off, law of confidentiality, law of tort, etc. The issue is that there finer point sof how these laws / principles allow is not yet fleshed out - it's a bit pointless to thow up very abstract statements about "deep linking = yes / no", as the answer will be either depending upon various other attributes and circumstance.
2) using technical issues (e.g. HTTP_REFER blocking) to prevent inbound deep / inappropriate links is not entirely all of the issue, part of the issue is that there still exists an inappropriate link on another website (e.g. a link to other_host/internal/junk/etc potentially reveals misleading information "internal/junk/etc" and disrupts legitimate user activity); sure I redirect those inappropriate links, but it potentially damages the experience for my users, and leads to a loss of goodwill for my business/website, potentially because users are mislead into thinking that my website is inappropriately configured, or find it a nuisance, or something else). again, I would say that the rule is not hard and fast either way and the law requires depending of some general principles / doctrines, and an understandign that within those, there is scope for variation depending upon particular circumstances of the case in question.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
No one said a damn thing about you not being allowed to move or rename your files, go ahead, that's perfectly acceptable, and no one has any right to complain about it.
If you don't understand what deep linking is then maybe you should shut the fuck up, and ask a question prior to ranting like an ignorant moron.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
If you set it up so that the only way you can get a session ID is to visit the top page first, you've effectively disabled deep linking, because any deep link that gets posts is going to contain an expired session ID. This way you don't have to trust the referrer field at all, which is a good idea.
It's stupid to use poorly-written legal disclaimers to do something that can be better accomplished via some simple well-written code.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
> I'm not going to protect it for you.
You might notice I never asked you to. However, I did delineate that there are costs and responsibilities that you should not be violating. And, more to the point, it's up to *me* to dictate the terms of use. Not you, not your mama, ME.
"If you don't understand what deep linking is then maybe you should shut the fuck up, and ask a question prior to ranting like an ignorant moron."
And if you have no sense of respect for others' property and rights, you should take your hippie ideals and shove them.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
There are no "hippie" ideals involved. It is an open public technology. You either play by the rules in place, or you don't play. It isn't up to you to dictate policy on an open protocol unless you enforce them, neither I, or anyone else has any responsibility to do it for you. Your rights aren't being violated, you just assume that everyone else should do whatever you want. Guess what, it's not going to happen.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.