Slashdot Mirror
New Orbitz Terms Prohibit Inbound Deep Linking
chekovma writes "Orbitz has announced a new set of Terms and Conditions that take effect March 12th which require anyone who uses their website (creates an account there) to follow strict inbound linking rules. These rules prohibit a user from creating even a plain text link to orbitz.com without first notifying them and require a user to take down such a link at their desire. It also disallows any deep linking -- meaning even this post violates those terms and conditions."
...as bad publicity. Seriously, way to get hits (I'd never heard of them).
What do you mean, unenforcable? If you enter into a contract with them, they can require you to refrain from deep linking and you're legally bound by that. People who are not their users however are not bound by their conditions and can keep linking.
I'm breaking section 6 of your stupid and unenforceable rules by not getting a 'separate linking agreement' with you before posting that link, and I'm not going to edit this post if you ask me to, becasue slashdot doesn't let anyone edit posts.
I challenge you to try and enforce your new terms and conditions, or drop them.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Generally I think their idea may be good, but maybe taken too far and/or poorly executed.
:-)
Here's why:
Orbitz is a travel site for purchasing tickets, etc. The price and availability of these things changes constantly. Additionally, I would bet they may run into customer service problems if too many people are all trying to view and/or book the same flights at the same time. The system is really designed to be a point in time quote system. The problem comes when someone does a deep link, to a quote for example. Chances are if a link is posted on the web (or sent through email), the page the new visitor sees may be different from the page/price/availability the creator of the link saw.
That all being said, there are technical means to reduce, if not eliminate this problem. Could be they are implementing a technical solution, and are putting this in the TOS so they have something to point to when deep links suddenly stop working and customers complain.
PR wise they could have done this better, but I bet they never thought a place like this would publicize a TOS change.
On the other hand, I could be all wrong about their motives.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
If they don't want links, don't link to them. I don't see how anybody is hurt by this except them.
Just by reading an EULA doesn't mean you agree to it.
Maybe, _maybe_, if you click 'I agree' you are bound to some parts.
Anyway, if they want to be a little island in cyberspace, then fine by me. If they really want to protect their IP they can pull out the ethernet cable from their webserver's NIC.
Dunno folks. It'd be interesting to see who they go after. I read that thing, and I wasn't thinking of Joe Sixpack linking to orbitz.com with a ilttle orbitz logo banner, but rather of someone ripping off their C/C page, with all the other links intact.
But heck, maybe that doesn't make any sense either.
Another possibility is someone slapping together a meta-airline search engine, that runs its own army of accounts and automatically sends requests to Orbitz, Travelocity, Expeida, Opopo (or whatever it is) at once, then returns the data
hey, you know, that sounds like a prtty good Firefox plugin...
Of course they can. But how in hell will they ever see another new customer via the internet again?
Too funny.
Is it fascism yet?
We wouldn't have much of this problem if browsers didn't send the HTTP "Referer" header that gave away the URL that linked to them. So I say let's cut this header out. They don't need to be tracking where we have visited before, anyway. And besides, that header name is misspelled.
And while you're at it, cut out the HTTP "User-Agent" header. With web standards, there's no longer any need for this, either. That will stop the practice of favoring certain browsers.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Does Google have an account at Orbitz ? If not, then any TOS Orbitz posts doesn't bind Google.
Simply viewing a web page does not make you bound into whatever inane rules that web page's maker has posted. Not even in the US, altought Orbitz can propably drive any private linker into banckrupty with court fees, so the law doesn't really matter there...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
>>Can't their web server just reject or redirect any page requests that don't have a referrer field of their own web site?
>Yeah, I'd have thought so. It might confuse tinfoil hat types though, or some proxies, who refuse to send referrers because the Orbitz site would break. You could, of course, use "no referrer and no session cookie" but the tinfoil hats aren't going to use cookies either.
Tin foil hat types who disallow cookies are probably a small percentage of the folks who will use Orbitz. While I hate sites that force cookies or referrers, I'd much prefer they take the technical route and do that rather than this silly "no deep linking to us or we'll C&D your ass" nonsense.
Although no longer updated, David E Sorkin's Don't Link to Us! page is still relevant.
A page like that could be useful for shaming companies into improving their linking policies.
As another poster implied, they don't want to block their affiliates. Of course, they could just set up their affiliates URIs to be an allowed referrer, but that would probably be too much trouble for them to keep track of who has their hands in what.
It frustrates me no end that companies keep on changing their TOS and privacy policies. As a person whose free time keeps getting sucked up by Slashdot, I really haven't the time or interest in reviewing every little change a lawyer wants to make in these documents.
And besides, how much do I need to use Orbitz? I don't find cheaper tickets there. I can always go straight to the airline, and if I really don't want to deal with a TOS, I can call them up myself or get a travel agent to do it. Hell, the last time I booked a flight for personal travel, my agent found me tickets that were about $100 cheaper each than the best I could find online.
So nuts to Orbitz. They can go suck eggs.
Just my $0.55 (US inflation, 1774-2008, for $0.02)
Well they'll obviously allow "shallow links" from other sites, and unless they have their server set up absolutely ridiculously, it should be easy for the server to recognize a URL that's considered "deep" from one that isn't.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's my website. Legally, and morally, you have no right to use it, any more than you have the right to use my toilet if I leave my house unlocked.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Shouldn't all their "deep links" be generated on the fly anyway? And why wouldn't they want all the links to the frontpage that they could get?
:-)
It doesn't matter what they say about you as long as they spell your url right.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
They WANT you to link to their site, but why would you do that? No reason, so they dare you not to!
Don't fall for it!
Of course they can. But how in hell will they ever see another new customer via the internet again?
...
by only putting that restriction on deep-linked files? (eg NOT the frontpage, or stuff with a google referrer, or maybe just !blank || @orbitz.com in the referrer?)
granted you can disable the http-referrer bit in some browsers
you can't have everything, where would you put it?
Let's just say they should use technical means to enforce this policy. I agree that users should be able to request a request to a public web server to get information. I also believe they should not be able to use laws to prohibit publication of "deep links". I also think any site that wants to disallow this should just use a technical means to prevent people from doing this. How? If a joint the size of Orbitz can't figure it out I'd be glad to sell them a solution - um right after I patent it.
Alternatively send this to corpcom@orbitz.com
Sirs,
I refer to the text of your Terms and Conditions as attached below.
My question to you is how do you intend to enforce these conditions since,
1. To read them someone must go to your site and find them.
2. You cannot dictate what any internet user puts on their own website, this is called the right to free speech and is embodied in almost every constitution in the world, even if some countries seem determined to undermine it with legislation.
and
3. A simple search on Google using the words Orbitz and Terms comes up with deep links to your own site. Do you now intend to ask google to remove all those links therefore rendering your website unreachable by the majority of internet users.
Would it not be simpler for your web administrator to implement code changes to restrict access to only your home page based on the referrer value rather then trying a legalise approach which has no possibility of succeeding and will in fact only mean that you will lose customers.
I look forward to hearing your reply.
(Your name here)
Relavent T&C section :
Inbound Links
We welcome links from a third party site to the home page of our Site, through a plain text link, provided that (a) you give Orbitz prior written notice of such link by contacting Orbitz Customer Service, to request Orbitz's permission to establish the link; (b) you discontinue providing a link to our Site if so requested by Orbitz; (c) you do not imply in any fashion that Orbitz is endorsing any of your products or service or is affiliated with you, (d) you do not present Orbitz in a false light, or provide misleading or false information about Orbitz, or its Site or Services, (e) you do not remove or obscure the copyright notices, or other notices on this Site; (f) you do not use any Mark of Orbitz; and (g) you do not replicate, frame or mirror the content of the Site. We reserve the right to require you to remove links to the Site, in our sole discretion. Linking to any page of the Site other than to the homepage is strictly prohibited in the absence of a separate linking agreement with Orbitz.
Bad SE rankings probably spells doom for them.
If I had more time and money, I'd give their financial data a look to see if there's any money to be made selling them short.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Typical "screen scrapers"
- QIXO
- Sidestep
They do all this by deep linking and parsing web sites of airlines and sites like Orbitz.This is objectionable to airlines and Orbitz for many reasons:
- These aggregators skip important and/or legally required information, such as passenger
facility charges, disclaimers, etc.
- They also tend to "hide" the service they
charge, making the fare seem higher than it
actually is.
- Many times, their screen scraping code is
buggy, and shows fares incorrectly higher or
lower
- Probably most importantly, they end up
controlling the "user experience", which means
the "scraped" web site can't offer add-ons like
car rentals and hotels.
Basically, it boils down to a general objection to being used a distribution system for a travel agent without having any control over the terms and conditions of said use.If they don't have a posted policy, it makes it more difficult to use legal action against operators that screen scrape.
It's my website. Legally, and morally, you have no right to use it, any more than you have the right to use my toilet if I leave my house unlocked.
Bad analogy; even if your right to stop people visiting is enforcable, it's not like leaving your house open.
The computer equivalent to that would be exploiting a security hole to gain access to a system that clearly wasn't intended for public use.
Your website is more like a shop, in that if it's publicly accessible and the doors are open, permission is implicitly being granted for people to come in, look around, and even look at stuff. Of course, you can hang a sign on the door in a prominent position detailing conditions for use of the shop. However, a publicly accessible website, even with restrictive conditions, is still more like a shop than a house.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Can you name a case where a click through EULA has failed? All the slashdot monkeys say they can't be enforced but yet they continue to do so, even in court such as every MMORPG in existance.
"Those are two instances which are clearly not in the best interests of Orbitz. However, what about more mundane uses? Perhaps I want to help a friend find the best price for their trip? Technically, I won't be able to directly link them to the results I've found. Instead, I'd have to walk them through exactly what search/browse/filter criteria to use and hope that their result set is no different than mine."
No, you wouldn't -- just e-mail your friend the link and don't worry about it.
It seems clear to me that Orbitz put this into place so that they have the grounds to go after others that are putting permanent deep links on their web sites. They're going after the aforementioned competitors, et al., and not you.
"Perhaps Orbitz should be allowed to do this. After all, it is their site. At the same time, however, consumers should voice their annoyance at being so inconvenienced. Just a quick email to their customer service department telling them "I'd love to use your site to find the best travel information I can, however, I find the TOS too restrictive for my needs and will be using Travelocity instead. I felt it important to inform you of this loss of business in the hopes that you will one day revise your TOS to allow deep linking for personal use.""
I'm not sure what the point of this would be, other than to get attention. If you want to send a link to a friend, do it. Their TOS hasn't been written for the purposes of what you're doing. No need to be a martyr.
In case I'm not being clear, here's a similar example. I run a web site which has a TOS that states that we have the right to bounce accounts for excessive profanity and various other naughty things. Now, this does not mean that we're running a profanity filter and proactively bouncing anybody who utters the random "fuck." The TOS is in place so that we have a clearly defined right to bounce people who are being obnoxious. If somebody were to send me an e-mail similar to yours -- "I would like to use your site but since you won't let me use profanity I'll go somewhere else instead" -- I would rightfully point out that they were being a moron.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
There are two possible reasons they're doing this:
1) to maximize their advertising, they want people to go in through the front page.
2) they're trying to stop screen-scraping aggregators
Blocking based on the Referer: header would be effective if their goal was #1, but pretty much useless if their goal is #2.
Actually, It does not matter if you sign the agreement because there is no exchange of value. If there is no exchange of value, a contract is not legally binding. The problem is that Orbitz wants to have their cake and eat it too. Too Bad for them!
It would seem that you can automatically extract that kind of information without "linking" to it at all. For example, WWW::Mechanize is a way to create a virtual browser that could even start at www.orbitz.com, follow links and/or fill out forms, meanwhile providing all cookie/referer information Orbitz needs, to get whatever data you need.
If you don't create a link, can you call it deep linking?
bp
I thought that the only time that 'prior art' matters with respect to patents is when someone spends $40,000 (or some other sky-high figure) to lodge a request for a review at the patent office?
Other than that, prior art seems pretty useless as a way to stop something being patented in the first place.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I liken a website to a public street, you have no real expectation privacy on the street, I don't think you should have much in the way of such on the web. The website is a public offering.
If I sat on the street, played guitar, I could not tell people passing by not to tell anyone about me, nor should they hum any tunes they heard me play.
Likewise with a website. If you don't want everyone to access it...don't put it out there.
They certainly shouldn't be able to sue you for nothing else but deep linking.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ok...instead of a direct deep link...would it be legal to get data from their website...reprocess, and put it up on yours? That way, nothing but 'facts' are on your website based upon what they put on their site?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well, except for the fact that your home is private property. The internet, specifically the web portion, is a public forum. If you don't want the information out there, don't put it out there.
Sure, you can tell me not to smoke in your house, but, you can't tell me not to smoke outside your house on the sidewalk in front of it and your property.
It would be more like you having a huge neon sign out on the front of your house. You couldn't tell me when and how long I could look at it from the street now could you?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Orbitz is owned by Cendant, not the airlines. It was bought out recently. If you RTFT (read the fucking terms), you'll see it refers to DEEP LINKING. You can still link to http://www.orbitz.com, but what you cannot due is link to a set of search results within the engine. This is not possible anyways, because the results from a search within Orbitz are linked to your 'session ID'. This session expires after 15 minutes of inactivity. So if you gave someone the URL, all that they would get would be a search box, anyways. This is mainly to prevent robots from crawling the site (and disregarding the robots.txt file). So it's really irrelevant. Orbitz can form special sticky URLs that link to a search result's CURRENT cache if they want, and they send these out in spam^H^H^H^Hmarketing e-mails.
Michael R. Rudel
Owner, http://www.obhost.net
in consideration for USING OUR SITE, you agree... how is that not Consideration? It doesnt have to be much, to be binding. You get something, the use of our site, we get something. No linking. Sounds legit to me...(IANAL)
Those links are all generally about EULA's, which is quite different, although I tend to feel that the shrink wrapped licenses are wrong, there are judges that feel both ways about it. Orbitz has put information on the web without making it private in any way. They could lock it off like a banking website does. I think any reasonably minded person would find that once you publish something on the internet it is fair game to read/use without restriction so long as copyright is not violated. Otherwise we risk having hidden contracts within every website we visit. That would completely screw up the internet. If I am forced to go through a license before I get something, ie. downloading java sdk from SUN, then that makes sense. But by putting a link to terms and conditions at the bottom of a website, you are not giving me value that I did not already have. The conditions of contracts that we consider legally binding in this country is out of control. You should not be bound to a contract if you were never aware that there was one in the first place.
The law agrees with you, (i.e. clickable contracts). If you did not know there was a contract because it was buried and to access the contract you need to find it then - no it is not enforceable. But if they make the contract the first thing you get before the site, or they put some disclaimer 'read the contract, because deep linking is not allowed per our TOA' then you need to obey the contract before proceeding. You have been warned...
Now it will be neat how this affects things like google web crawl.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.