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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."
I just wanted to tell you how much I love you! Have a great day!
Orbitz has silly new rules for users.
So don't use them.
Duh.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Ok, they have some unenforcable legal nonsense in their terms & conditions, but does that justify giving them a free advert on slashdot?
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
How about someone sits them down and explains what would happen to the web if everyone had this policy?
Jesus, you'd think their web developers would have pointed out their stupidity - or maybe I'm just being naive.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
By reading this comment, you agree that you will not link to this comment or any of its child comments. You also agree to mod it up, using any and all mod points that you currently have.
By reading the terms and conditions of this comment, you are locked in to obeying them by the most basic laws of physics of the universe and failure to obey them will cause you and your entire family to instantly cease to exist.
I'm a big tall mofo.
If you don't like their terms, don't use their service.
This has nothing to do with "rights".
Ok, so if you post a dupe of story it could be serious. No dupe postings of this story after March 12th :)
A legal/contractual agreement which is established by a click through agreement is unlikely to be enforcable, and even if it were, HOW are they going to enforce it? Are they going to sue you for linking to them? If the sued party got an even semi-competent judge and council it wouldn't be much of an issue, if you put a site on the public internet, and don't take proper technical measures to insure that people don't take actions you don't want them to then your site is pretty much fair game. It's extremely easy to insure that people don't go to a part of your site that you don't want them to, porn operators have been doing it for the better part of a decade now, so scrap the stupid unenforcable EULA crap and have your web monkies earn their salaries!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Can't their web server just reject or redirect any page requests that don't have a referrer field of their own web site?
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
By removing all links to Orbitz from other domains, watch them fall in search engine rankings. Orbitz fails to realize they only are high in the search results because other sites link to them. Their current policy indicates they don't want to even show up!
Well, by signing up with them for an account, you agree to terms which aren't like those usually associated with browsing the web. If the pages are something you could get to without agreeing to terms, then it would be difficult to justify their position, but when you click "I Agree", you've agreed not to.
Of course, something like this is enforceable through technical means, which is probably more workable as a solution.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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.
Why would anyone need to deep link to a gum that keeps your teeth clean anyway?
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Man, your lawyer must have friends in very high places if he can issue a Cease to Exist notice!
How is such a thing delivered? Does the Reaper come in person?
Blockwars: Free, multiplayer, Tetris like game.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
> I can look at it any damn way I'd like
I'm sorry but you can't if they don' want you to.
If they redirect all visitors to their home page, unless the visitor has a recent session cookie of Orbitz.com, you won't be able to access anything without first visiting Orbitz.com.
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...
I'd never heard of them
Congrats to whoever wrote your popup blocker.
http://www.google.com/search?q=link:+http://www.or bitz.com/&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
I smell 46,600 lawsuits coming...
But seriously, this isn't even logical let alone enforceable, it will fail.
orbitz is supported by our tax dollars?
Please, do explain.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
-- http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/deeplinking
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
I use Orbitz all the time, and I have generally had good experiences with them. In fact, I used them the other day to book a trip to Phoenix. It's too bad these new terms are so restrictive.
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.
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)
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
Or maybe, Legality of 'Deep Linking' Remains Deeply Complicated
BTW, anyone who reads this post owes me $20, that's my TOS.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Someone should maintain a cache of links to the Orbitz site. Just a list in an html with all of the non-member accessible URIs you can find.
;)
Since non-members aren't bound by this agreement, it'd be interesting to see what actions (if any) they would take.
It looks like a flight booking site. I could not find any flights with it as it does not support flights that originate in Europe (including Russia), Africa, Asia, Australia and South America.
It's not really difficult to go beyond this simple binary rule, and have a list of domains from which linking is allowed to any particular page other than the home page.
But by their own rules, they wouldn't even get the chance to redirect the evil links. To paraphrase Barbara Billingsley in Airplane:
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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.
- American
- Continental
- Delta
- Northwest
- United
Travelocity is a SABRE company. Expedia is the Microsoft controlled travel site.What is the difference between deep linking and quoting someone else's written work in your own? As long as they get credited, you can do it. I understand that there are advertisements on Orbitz's website and that they need people to see them so that they can make money, but come on.
If that is their argument, then I pose the following:
Could I publish a book that had ad space in it and then disallow references to it? (I'm not asking if this is legally feasible, since there is more than enough legal history to strike down any such attempt. I am simply asking if that would be a valid comparison.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You mean this link:- http://www.orbitz.com/robots.txt?
:-P
Afraid they can't sue me for that. I've never visited their site (except for pop up ads which I didn't give permission for), so I haven't agreed to their silly EULA.
That was so much fun, I think I'll do it again. http://www.orbitz.com/robots.txt !!! http://www.orbitz.com/robots.txt !!! http://www.orbitz.com/robots.txt !!!
Neh neh nyeah-nyeah neh!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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).
What happens if you violate the terms and conditions by deep linking into their site? They terminate your account and you can't give your money to them? OH well. Problem self-solved.
If they don't want to get linked at all, they should switch from HTML to PDF or publish all pages in a single MSWord document. That's it.
The WWW was designed to allow for links from one document to the other. It is neither possible nor netiquette to prohibite that. Dumb bitches.
I've always wondered if 404's count as a deep link.
!
Look at me orbitz!!!
http://www.orbitz.com/global/I'm%20deep%20linking
I'll expect my summons in the mail.
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.
Could Orbitz claim that their URLs are their intellectual property, and forbid anyone else from using that property
Which makes absolutely no sense because there is no such legal entity as "Intellectual Property".
Perhaps you meant to sugest that theur URLs were copyrighted?
Perhaps you meant to sugest that theur URLs were patented?
Perhaps you meant to sugest that theur URLs were trade secrets?
Perhaps you meant to sugest that theur URLs were trademarks?
Well copyright fails because a URL is a peice of factual information, just like some street address. You cannot copyright factual information. So that doesn't work.
Patents fail because, well, a URL isn't an invention. So that doesn't work.
Trade secrets doesn't work because the moment they allow members of the public to ever see the URL is ceases to be a trade secret. So that doesn't work.
Trademark doesn't work because by using the URL you are not deceptively engaging in commerce under that trademark or otherwise confusing the public. So that doesn't work.
Intellectual Property is a really really rotten term. In any discussion using the term Intellectual Property the probably of someone missunderstanding the law rapidly aproaches 1.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I know of a case from the Netherlands where newspaper editors wanted to prohibit deep linking to their sites. The judge did not honor the request.
IMHO you can link to whatever you want on the Internet. There are enough ways to prevent your content being accessed by unauthorized people. The content provider is the only one responsible for its authorization management.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Breakin the law!
Breakin the law!
Breakin the law!
!hoD
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
That's a very, um, professional sounding email. If I were looking for a good, levelheaded "Web Developer", I'd hire you in a minute. Good thing this post is archived online for future reference, with your name and all.
Seriously, I hope you think you're this cool when you google it ten years from now. My college newspaper archived some of my old "letters to the editor" and they're damned embarrassing. Sounded great to me then though, and who knew then that this new internet thing would be here to keep them accessible forever.
Trade secrets doesn't work because the moment they allow members of the public to ever see the URL is ceases to be a trade secret. So that doesn't work.
I figure the thinking is that they don't allow "members of the public" to ever see the URL. They allow only account holders, who have agreed to the non-disclosure policy which is the subject of this article, to see the URL.
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.........
ita software built the fastest fare search engine in the world and leases it out to comanies like Oribtz. If you don't have a specific business deal with Orbitz, you can get your optimized fare straight from ITA and just go to website of of the airline they turn up for you to book the flight directly with the carrier...same prices, same seats, wicked fast.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
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
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