Deeplinking Prohibited by Indian Court

Anonymous Coward writes "The Delhi High Court recently passed a temporary injunction restraining India Jobs Search Engine Bixee.com from linking to Naukri.com. This is the first case of its kind in India. There have been similar cases before in the US (Ticketmaster vs Microsoft), Denmark, Australia and Germany before. Wikipedia has a detailed article on the "deeplinking" issue."

Comments

not so anonymous coward

[SecureTheNet]

Don't you love how slashdot provided a link to the anonymous coward's email right there in the headline? On this article it might not matter so much, but if it was a chinese citizen posting about a chinese rights article, it might matter. Way to go, slashdot.

Re:not so anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, anonymous_coward is actually a /. user. Maybe that's who it is.

Re:not so anonymous coward

[ceejayoz]

Tip: If you wish to remain anonymous on a Slashdot story submission... don't fill out the e-mail address field!

Hell, it even says:

If you wish to be anonymous, feel free to leave the identifying fields blank. Anonymity has no effect on whether we will accept or reject the story.

Re:not so anonymous coward

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, look at the source. It's 'Anonymous Coward'. They've done a similar thing in previous stories.

Open door unless posted otherwise

[cgenman]

If you don't want someone on your website, you put a password on it. If you don't want someone on your wireless network, you put up some barrier. This has been the standard behavior on the network forever, and works pretty well. Open unless locked. Websites are like stores in downtown Manhattan, people assume you're open and try to walk in. If you're closed, you put a lock on the door so that people know what your policy is.

Why is it, then, that people who don't want deep linking on their sites don't simply use the Referer ID to determine where the person came from, and block out those who didn't come from the current site? Technologically speaking, it is a very simple trick that has been used for years on smaller sites here and there, and larger sites to prevent direct linking to images. From a scripting standpoint it is trivial to look at the referer id and redirect to the home page if it didn't originate on the serving site. It is as easy to do, as finding someone's IP address, yet the people who care don't seem to care enough to do it.

You don't solve a technological problem through legislation. You especially don't change standard network behaviors on a case-by-case basis through legislation. And quite frankly you don't voluntarily venture onto a network with certain standard behaviors and then complain to the feds about them. "Oh look, my mobile network line allows for incoming calls. Boo Hoo Hoo, Uncle Sam protect me."

Re:Open door unless posted otherwise

[voice_of_all_reason]

You don't solve a technological problem through legislation. You especially don't change standard network behaviors on a case-by-case basis through legislation. And quite frankly you don't voluntarily venture onto a network with certain standard behaviors and then complain to the feds about them.

You forget, though, that these are crazy foreign people. Have you seen Temple of Doom?

Seriously though, they still beleive in a freaking caste system. It's going to take a couple generations before they can grasp the finer points of the internets.

Re:Open door unless posted otherwise

[pkphilip]

Courts in India are often over zealous when it comes to computer related issues and quite often issue orders which are rediculous. This is mostly because the court has a very superficial understanding about computer technology.

The cops are no better. For example, in Chennai, they recently banned the playing on LAN games at Netcafes in the city. By "they" I mean the cops. I don't see what authority the cops have to ban anything in this country as they certainly don't have any legislative powers but these things happen a lot in India.

Quite often the boundaries between what a court can do, what the legislature can do and what the police can do is very faint or completely blurred in India. For instance, the supreme court in India mandated that all public transportation buses in Delhi must be converted to run on natural gas. I don't see how that is even allowed since the supreme court does not have any legislative powers.

An article on the issue:

[nursegirl]

http://www.efytimes.com/fullnews.asp?edid=9018

It appears that Bixee.com is an aggregator site for job searches, but Naukri is stating that "when [Bixee.com's] website becomes popular and gains a large number of hits, the necessity to access the plaintiff's website would be obviated."

That doesn't make any sense. Aggregators can't survive without the sites that they aggregate. Most aggregator sites won't ever choose to become content providers, because of the resources that this would entail.

Aggregators have positive and negative effects on the sites they aggregate, but it would be counter-productive for them to make the sites themselves unnecessary.

Re:An article on the issue:

[Bogtha]

It's poorly worded, but I believe the "necessity" they are referring to is the necessity for users, not for the aggregation service. Essentially, they are saying that as the deep-linker becomes more popular, the users won't have to view the original site because they'll be going to the deep-linker's site.

Re:An article on the issue:

[Anonymous Coward]

Moreover Naukri has forgotton how it started running.
In the early days, it used to cover Ads from the Print
Media and post those Ads on their site to attract
regular traffic.

two notes about spoofing the referID

[rednuhter]

two notes about spoofing the referID
one: its easy BUT you have to use command line programs (wget) or plugins, in other words you have to delibertly set out to fool the content provider.
two: becuase note one takes effort you can pretty much guaranty 99% of you visitors will not employ it (of course there are execptions).
So as long as nothing mission critical needs protecting then checking referID is a good thing for websites to employ, just do not rely on it 100%.

Re:two notes about spoofing the referID

[Bogtha]

It's impossible to spoof the Referer header... for the purpose of making deep-linking work. The person using the browser is the person who can spoof the Referer header. If you want to deep-link to something, you are the person running the linking website, you aren't the person using the browser.

Re:two notes about spoofing the referID

[Anonymous Coward]

um....no?
Have you never heard of a reverse proxy?
Change the links to actually point to your app server, and have it spoof the referrer.

done and done.

Re:two notes about spoofing the referID

[Bogtha]

That's not deep-linking though, that's basically hosting a copy yourself.

Re:two notes about spoofing the referID

[drinkypoo]

It's impossible to spoof the Referer header... for the purpose of making deep-linking work.

I haven't tried this yet, but... Put an iframe where you want to embed their content, and hide it. Now, load a document on their own site into the iframe. Now, tell that iframe to load whatever you wanted to embed. Finally, unhide the iframe... It works by manually pasting URLs, I'd think it would work this way as well, but like I said, I didn't test it.

This "story" should not have been posted

[real gumby]

This is an important topic, but the /. article doesn't include a link to any report. So it should not have been posted.

With a link it's news (and in this case news that would matter). Without it it's just hearsay.

SOLUTION

[samjam]

Don't deep link, merely post the text of the URL you WOULD have linked to.
*cough*

And take advertising from companies offering browser plugins that automatically turn URLs back to links.

Can this even be done with alternate style sheets?

Sam

Re:SOLUTION

[pla]

And take advertising from companies offering browser plugins that automatically turn URLs back to links.

Not the one I used to use (which also "cleaned" links that included redirects), the name of which I've forgotten, but the Linkification Firefox extension does exactly what you want. URL-like text on a page automagically turns into a link.

Which only leaves one question - Will "they" try to ban Firefox, or just anything containing the magic word "http"?

That was fast...

[RenQuanta]

...someone already updated the Wikipedia entry to include this story.