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Deep Linking Troubles Continue
Glothar writes "There is a case currently before the US court system (somewhere) based on one web site linking to content (trailers and other fun stuff) within Universal Pictures' web site. Universal is basically saying it can not be done. There is an article on Wired about it. Basically, they want it to be a copyright infringement. In reality, they are upset because they want everybody to have to look at advertising. However, it may make the URL I just gave you a copyright violation as well. Ironic. " Proof once again that the old school business world has a lot to learn about
the Internet.
As long as big business is run by old men, there will be NO understanding of the internet. Bsides, all they're after is money. That's what companies do. Make money.
-brain
Hey all,
I run an atari emulation web site. It's not exactly 'good' but it serves its purpose. On the site there is a large of collection of various files. Now whilst I wouldn't mind someone linking to my site, if they were to link to the files directly then that would get to me. Bandwidth would be taken up, and the whole point of running a web site would slowly diminish.
So, if a web site on a slow line links to another site for various downloads, then the slow site is in the wrong... why not ask the webmaster of the fast site if it's alright to do so in the first place ? If they say no then count your losses and link to the main site. Is that too much to ask ?
The Web is made of links. Then Can you consider web portals robots illigal ? How are these compagny expect to get some hist if they aren't linked from the outside ? I say lets start an petition saying we will "unlink" universals studios from every page that links it and lets see how they will react ? how much traffic will they loose ? that's the way to go , a bit mlike the blue ribbon speech campaign - such action need some support from nntities like the electronic frontier foundation - Anyway these kind of ruling will only affect the US - then all web maker content maker will have to leave the country and this is bad for most ISPs they should help in such case because if the ruling really is issued then noOne in the US will be able to link any site without the fear of being sued - isn't that aginst USA first Amemdment - When asked for a direction do you hust have to say its on your left (because being too precise would get you in trouble ...) damn money maker .... Thats exacly why I don't feel Capitalism being the way - Capitalism needs more goverment coontrol than what exists (even in countries where that control seems strong).
none Yet.
You are missing something:
Not only do they want people to come and watch their ads, they want to get paid for it at the same time by having those people load their banner ads.
-Snibor Eoj
Or you could detect IE5 and just transparently redirect them to Netscape's download page.
I'd never use that site again! Isn't the point of a browser to be able to view HTML? Well, Netscape isn't HTML compatible.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
http://www.ispec.net/adext
I maintain the blocking list for you and the client grabs it automatically.
If you rip out an article and give it to somone to read. After all, you're subverting their carefully laid out frontmatter, which consists of any number of really expensive ads which their advertisers have every right to expect you to read.
Extrapolating, will periodicals in e-book form force you to scroll through pages of ad-crap before you get to read the articles?
Perhaps there is something to be said for paper, after all.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
Fuck ads. Write spiders.
Adverts are so evil.
So information doesn't exist until someone understands data. And? That doesn't make it "want to be free". That just makes it "want to exist", which it can do just fine locked behind the strictest firewall protected by the tightest non-disclosure agreement you can imagine, as long as the people you want to have that information can get to it. The contents of your web browser's cache are information that someone would probably pay good money for, but that doesn't mean you have a moral obligation to upload your history files to Doubleclick so they can build better profiles on you.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It is free. You just have to pay for it. You don't understand free software at all, do you?
In regards to the Wired article 'Universal: Don't Link to Us'*, I would like to point out that preventing direct linking is a very minor technical hurdle, and should have never made it to the lawyers.
e d/index.html
I personally use a page wrapper that I wrote to prevent people from linking directly into some of my pages. It also has the added feature of allowing web search engines to pass right through to the content, while directing visitors from those engines to the page I want them to start at. That gives me maximum exposure. If Universal were to insall a similiar wrapper, and drop the suit, all those external links could now be channeled to a chosen destination. Less bad press, and more control of the content being shown.
Here is an example of my page wrapper. This is a direct link to an archived project on my site. Because I don't want people being directed directly to it, and therefore not be aware that this is a dead project, I bounce them up to the top of the archive heiarchy.
http://www.ghostwheel.com/~merlin/archive/enchant
It is a shame that large corporations who are persuing technology as an income source do not also look to the same technology as their solution. Two hours of my time as a contract programmer could have saved them a fortune in legal fees.
-ck
Now this can be extrapolated to mean that *any* company or person that complains to a service provider about a link to works that company or person has copyrights for can force the service provider to remove the link under penalty of law... I'd personally love to see (say) Universal take on (say) Altavista like this...
(Oh yeah... CST is Scientology... ;))
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I strongly disagree. In the examples you cite, there is no copying. Nothing is being reused, repackaged, or resold. A reference is not the same as a copy!
Suppose you run a site that serves copyrighted material, where the users have to pay for access to the material. If you want to charge users for content, then that's where the charging should take place: when they access the content. When someone tries to retrieve a not-free file from your server, whether it was refered to by your site or elsewhere, you still should have a username/password on it, or check a cookie or something. Either way, they either agree to pay, or they don't get the file.
If you're relying on your customers to retrieve some files before others, then you've missed the point of hypertext, and probably shouldn't be running a business that uses it (a pay web site).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Of a story i read a year or two back, where one of two major british newspapers was linking to stories on the other's website. This basically pissed everyone off at the "linked-too" newspaper, so they took the other one to court. I don'tknow how it turned out.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
A similar case was fought in the UK a couple of years ago : the out-of-court settlement permitted the links, but required them to go to specific parts of the articles (headlines) and to indicate on the linking page who owned the real articles.
(So I didn't bother learning junkbuster's cookie jar configuration. But it looks on the face of it very useful)
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
Would I get into trouble if I set up a proxy to block all ads being delivered to the pages, but still let the pages through? What if I let other people use my proxy to avoid the ads? What if I charged for the service?
The thing that really disturbs me about this is that it sort of defeats the whole point of the internet: To get information as quickly and easily as possible. If there is one thing I can't stand, it's getting a link which says, "See the new trailer of XYZ here", and then I have to jump through fifteen more hoops, or use another sites search engine to find the page. If I get routed to the front page, and the thing I am looking for is not there, I'm outta there. I'm not going to flip through five more pages of advertisements to get it. It's kind of like neighboring cities saying, "I don't want you linking to my city without first routing all traffic down Main Street so that they can drive by all our tourist attractions. I'm not going to look at all of the tourist attractions. I'm going to say, "I need to get the hell out of this town and never come back again."
Exactly, he wasn't copying anything, just pointing to where they had made it publicly available, don't see how they've got a leg to stand on. Same with the Bill Gates icon, as long as you con't copy it I don't see any legal recourse against you for linking to it.
Regarding the hypothetical ad-ripping machine and commercial-skipping VCR, the publishers and networks certainly _would_ care. When the assumption that every magazine read by a consumer also contains ads is nullified, circulation figures will become meaningless, and the advertisers will stop buying.
If lots of people started blocking TV commercials, the Nielsen ratings most definitely _would_ take it into account.
Similar situation here. They're not really worried about people taking their own content, they're worried about people taking it without the lucrative ads that go with it. And if the advertisers conclude that there's a lot of deep linking going on, they'll stop advertising.
I just don't get it. I can see why Universal might be upset about images used on the site, but links? You can't copyright a URL, only the information contained on that URL, far as I'm concerned. Where does this leave internet directories like Yahoo!? Could they be considered illegal as a result of this as well?
All Universal is concerned about is its ad revenues, nothing more.
paranoid.android
Isn't it possible to check the referring page or site and block access to a page if the referring page isn't an approved one?
With this mechanism, if sites don't want outside referrals to their pages or content, it seems to me that they should take responsibility themselves to block access if it doesn't come from their own referring pages, and not run crying to an outside agency.
I of course apologize in advance if I'm dead wrong on how this blocking mechanism works.
Check out "Stupid Stupid Movie Studio"
Why dont we put a link on all of our webservers. If they want to be consistent they would have to sue us all. I think they just want to execute and example. Lets see if they have enough lawyers to find us all ;-)
And the web is a perfect example of this. If Universal doesn't want people to be able to look at their stuff without going through their website then they shouldn't put it out on the internet PERIOD.
a der.gif"? It's not a "Link".. but if you type it into your URL window it will "skip" their main site.
If they win this suit what next? Will they sue me if I tell (ala voice) someone the direct URL to an image on their site too? What's stoping me from instead of linking saing check out "www.universal-pictures.com/images/tippytoplefthe
Please if you have a problem with how the web works.. then don't use it.
Ex-Nt-User
...maybe things will get done. /. why don't we tell them what we think?
They have a feedback page for you to send them email about whatever you want (except creative movie ideas). If we go there and tell them that they can create a script or something to block or redirect unwanted links, then maybe we can avoid this legal battle. Instead of talking about it over here on
IANAL, but I play one on
It's time for the studios and media to wake up and realize that the public isn't their bitch anymore.
By the way, Universal, do you plan on releasing anything resembling a good movie in the near future? Or do you intend on blowing all your dough on legal battles?
....you can't use the freeway (Interstate) because you don't drive on the backroads where there are many businesses starving for your attention.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Is it me or does this say that they (Movie-List people) must detroy their films. Sorry I know what they meant but this is really bad english. "remove all images from our films" - huh? As well as "links to other sites that have our servers" - what's that mean? I can't link to a site that owns their server? Doesn't a server own a site? Argggghhh my head hurts. Can't translate.
-cpd
The single problem with your analysis is in understanding how Movie-List linked to Universal. They did not, as you suggested, just give the URL to the user. Instead, the content does appear inside the Movie-List page. This is why there is a lawsuit. The data resides on Universal's servers, but users see it at Movie-Lists' site.
I invite any non-American who has Web storage space to go to the Universal site, collect as many internal URLs as they feel necessary, and post them on the Web. Let's see them prosecute this!
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
3M lawyer Charles U. Farley had this to say, "This decision is a clear vindication of our rights. We were able to conclusively prove that the information on most direct routes these "maps" provided led to significantly reduced travel time, and therefore reduced viewings of our product, decreasing the value of our holdings."
All roadmaps are to be recalled, and Congress has passed a federal law allowing the police to search cars that look as though they might be carrying maps, such as those with out-of-state plates, rental cars, and foreign-looking drivers. Possession of a map will be punishable by a $1000 fine and use of a map by up to 6 months in jail.
>But it's all a moot point anyway, because he's
>advertising their damned movies. They should be
>paying him. And if they're that concerned about
>it, check the HTTP_REFERER!
Companies are evidently afraid that somebody else is making a profit from adds while using the company's server to offer content.
My idea is that the linker would have his adds to make money, he'd use a frame or something to display a frame-ready page from the company being linked to. The framed page would have it's own adds on it that generated revenue for the company. The company could check the referrer tags and such to award the linking entity for linking.
If such nettiquete could be adhered to, then such things as lawsuits (with the associated common law precendents) and loss of internet autonomy could be avoided.
Everybody wins!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Why should linking to images from other web sites be wrong? If you don't want people to link to your stuff, don't put it on the Web.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
First off, where did this term "deep linking" come from? I wouldn't be surprised to find some lawyer somewhere coined the term. Links are just links; they're what make the World Wide Web work.
Sure, most sites just use links as navigation controls ("Next Page", "Top", "Home", or even "click here"), but good sites also use them to direct a user to more information on a topic within the context of the page itself.
Where I think the problem arises is not "how do I ensure that my valuable ad banners get seen?" (Jakob Neilsen wrote in 1997 that advertising doesn't work on the web and in another article about research on web users' behavior that while ad banners are the most-used form of advertising on the web, it is the least successful.) but "how do I protect my intellectual property on the Web?"
In this case, I went to Movie-List to check it out, and it is a banner-driven (hence, I assume, ad-supported) site that is, essentially, a "link farm". He takes the trailers for movies and wraps his own HTML around them (complete with banner ad), and doesn't even acknowledge the movie studios the trailers are coming from. If I see a trailer from Universal's web site, I should have the option of hitting a link to their site to look around; Movie-List traps you there so you can look at his banner ads.
I would think that this is a violation of fair use (which is going to have to be redefined somewhat, if it hasn't already, to handle the Web) made worse by the fact that he's not incurring any bandwidth penalty himself; he's using their servers to host the information he's supposedly getting ad money off of, the trailers. My gut feeling is that Universal is in the right on this one.
Obviously, the concept of "fair use" on the Web is going to need to protect both the rights of the person who makes their intellectual property available on the web and the right of the person who wants to provide a link to it.
I would think that a good "fair use" policy for the Web should have the following requirements:
1) People should be allowed to point to copyrighted material on another site without obtaining explicit permission if they acknowledge the copyright holder of the material (either by providing the link in the context of their site, as my Alertbox examples do, or in the case of an image or movie, providing a link to the source of the copyrighted material). If search engines were to use the "copyright" LINK attribute (if properly set) on a page, I'd think that covers their backsides neatly.
2) People should only be able to place a page from another site within their own frame if the owner of the content of that site gives their permission (as I did when I set up my home page at XOOM) or for educational or informative purposes (a site that teaches good/bad web design, or a live "portfolio" of a webmaster's work). In the latter case, the frame should not have any ads on it.
3) A subscription-based site shouldn't include any copyrighted material from another source without that source's permission, period. Just live a print magazine.
This is just off of the top of my head; what else should go into a decent "Fair Web Use" policy?
Jay (=
I understand what you're saying and I agree with it in principle; I just don't know how it's going to pan out in practice.
The sticking point is that the server being used to serve the content is in the cost center of the objecting party. The objecting party may have rights based on the fact that their machinery is being depreciated and are suffering the costs involved in bandwidth and administration.
My proposal, which may need to be amended, is to find a way to avoid such litigation and to award the participants. Your idea of a password protected site would work for the purpose of security but... the whole reason for the litigation is that the serving company wants add revenue - it needs to be publicly available. Can't they come to some mutually beneficial agreement without litigation???
I do agree, however, that it would be a seriously detrimental thing if the internet were to become bogged down in a complicated rights and priveleges quagmire. I'm certainly open to suggestions!
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I was discussing this issue with a friend of mine not too long ago.
One interesting argument is this: Consider a movie theatre owner. At the front door, he charges admission (or makes people watch advertisements, or whatever). However, his theatre has a side door that is always unlocked. The theatre owner does have the right to post signs telling people not to come in through the side door-- it may not prevent people from coming in, but he can at least prosecute those who do.
This is all well and good for theatre owners.
However, there is a major distinction between theatres and the Web, and the distinction is this: the Web is a public forum.
When placing a work in a public forum, you are the one responsible for restricting access to that work. Plain and simple.
I understand UP's position, but it's their responsibility to restrict access to the site, not the responsibility of everybody else on the web.
Best wishes to MovieList-- stick with it, this is an important issue!
The classic counter example is that having sex is legal, selling something is legal. Prostitution is illegal.
Just because the components are legal does not mean that the combination is legal. (Though I will grant that it probably should be legal)
- KGB Nth post, where N is a number between 1 and the total number of posts.
Not only did I read it, but I was about to say the
same thing...
Anyone who makes browsers better watch out! Disable bookmarks or be sued for copyright infringement (or perhaps just "accessory to copyright infringement.")
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I think that the biggest problem in this case appears to be that the trailers etc from the Universal site are being presented as content on the MovieList site.
This is a little silly. Do you really believe that if someone downloaded a trailer via this link would believe that it was created by MovieList? I'd think that the huge "Universal" logo at the beginning of the trailer would be a tip-off that it was, in fact, created by Universal. Besides, trailers are esentially advertisements. Would an advertiser (in this case Universal) be upset if you were to show their ad for free (or at least provide another route to it)? I think not.
This has got to be the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
Here's an analogy:
Imagine that Wired magazine (for example) has a great article about Linux in its latest print issue, and I want readers of my web site to know about it. Obviously, I couldn't post a verbatim copy of the article on my site -- that would be copyright infringement. But I would be able to write, "There's a great article about Linux on page 50 of Wired." Should Wired be able to sue me because people wouldn't read the ads on pages 1-49? Of course not.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Let me be more clear; I was thinking of "free" in the sense of being available for public consumption, rather than the sense of not costing money. There is nothing about information that demands it not have a price, only that it can be attained (even if for a price).
Let your information be free, but it's okay to make them pay for it.
What's the problem with preventing links to your server? A lot of sites stay up because of loading images as advertisements. If you link through to that, the content owners may not get the money. I bet if I linked to Slashdot without loading up any of the graphics, thereby causing Rob and pals to lose out on cash while still having to server the page, /. would have a hissy. And rightfully so. Second, a link can be very damaging to a server. I used to run a small ftp server which I used to let my friends get sounds and files from my University-networked machine. Someone on the outside with a lot more hits then I got decided to link to my sounds, and BOOM - saturation. I was plenty pissed. Finally, there's a real important point here - this is UNVIERSAL's content. If they don't want anyone linking to it, then no one should. Intellectual Property, people - if you want their product/service, do it their way or not at all.
Now I'm worried. I realize that this is a satire since I haven't seen such a report anywhere else. The thing that bothers me is that with all the things we've heard in the last month or two (i.e., Echelon, the Armed Services Committee bill, the ability of law enforcement to get info without a warrant, etc.), it doesn't sound the least bit far-fetched. I think the government has just raised the bar on satire. You're gonna hafta go a ways farther out on that limb to make it really sound like satire. Otherwise you're just gonna freak people out and have them checking all the other news sites for more info.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
A strange adjective to throw in between that damning invective. Has the act of reading books become a symbol of the authoritarian 'Man'?
Proclaiming the enemy to be 'book reading' seems only to underscore one's own ignorance. Or did I misinterpret this -- was it intended as a slandering of the old school's medium of choice, dead trees as opposed to electrons?
Either way, knowledge is knowledge, regardless of the medium in which it is conveyed.
So they don't want people to skip their adds. That much I get, but why go through a legal battle to do it. They could just setup the server to block people coming from the movie-list site, or only allow people to view the trailers if they are coming from the universal site, or use a cgi setup to generate random URLs for each client. There are a million technical ways they could go about this, and I gaurantee that they are all cheaper than fighting it out in court. I guess it comes down to big companies not having a clue about technology. I also fail to understand the legal issue. Sure the trailers belong to them, but can they copyright the URL? I wouldn't think so, but who knows.
-matt
I can't even tell you how many times I have been denied access to a deep page because of the referring page. There is a simple technological solution that doesn't require litigation. However, as a company that relies on IP for it's income I can see how panic would quickly set in. /. become illegal and every link you want to add to a page must be researched and requested. If you don't want me to link to your pages, it is YOUR responsibility to keep me from it.
My question is of course "Why would you want to keep people from seeing your trailer?" Do we have to pay (by ignoring banner ads) just to see your other advertisement?
If you really want to limit acces, then REALLY limit access. Password protect the file, make a login necessary, require blood pacts, but don't post something on the Internet at large and then get pissed when people link to it. THAT'S WHAT THE MEDIUM IS!!!
We (those that have a clue) must be vocal in protecting the rights and freedoms of Internet users everywhere, as well as the ideals of open information and, gaddamit, the ability to link wherever I damn well please. If we don't it won't be too long before sites like
(/incoherent rant {work sux bad after vaca...I miss Cabo:(})
+&x
Instead of suing them, its not that freakin' difficult to write an Apache module (and presumably a module under any other server) that checks the referrer and not serve the requested file if the referrer isn't on the local site.
Keeps people from using your images and crap like that.
The copyright infringement thing is just silly, but I can understand why they don't want people doing that. Its easy enough to fix technically...
So, they will subvert the whole point of the world wide web, and we will eventually build something new for them to "discover."
Sorry, I'm crabby today. If you don't want people to link to your stuff, DON'T PUT IT ON THE WEB!
--
If they wanted people to stop from indirectly linking to stuff they can do it quite easily. Xoom for example used to (don't know if they still do) stop people from indirectly linking to images on any website within thier domain.
Of course, since the content itself is trailers (i.e. movie ads) this whole difficulty seems a little strange in the first place.
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
If they have a decent website all the way through then people will go back to the other pages on the site. Trying to funnel people through a roadway is like taking an 8 lane highway down to a single lane in the middle of rush hour. Yes it can be forced, no its not a good way to endear one self to others.
Are they going after Movie List because it's a large site? I can think of a million websites I've been to with the most non-descriptive links in the world.
Eventually someone's going to hit a Universal ad on their site, so what's the big deal? Don't they have enuf $ and hits already?
Is this just silliness or plain greed?
>I hope the judge is technically competent enough to see it as such and throws it out.
Indeed! A guy (I should scan in this article) tried to sue the Cdn government claiming he was being discriminated against because he was a martian. The judge threw it out, saying the Constitution only applied to human beings, and if Mr. X believed he was a martian, then it didn't apply to him...god, it was so dumb!
Universal is one of the more reactionary intellectual-property corporations. They essentially declared war on MP3, opposing it at every turn, and banning all artists signed to them from releasing MP3s. (Since Universal (which also owns PolyGram) controls 35% of the music market, this is not without consequence.)
Their demands for total control of content and legalistic sabre-rattling are completely in character.
Whether it's linked illegally or linked officially, the Sorenson clips which have become standard aren't going to get any more playable for UNIX users.
Interesting to see companies getting in on the act. In Germany, there was a court ruling about a year ago stating that it was forbidden to link to hate sites or sites containing illegal material under German law. Thus, if you are in Germany and link to a site containing, say, pictures of Nazi leaders (regardless of where that site is), you could be in trouble with the law in Germany (pro-Nazi material and political parties are strictly forbidden), even though you may think you bear no responsibility for what is on the other site.
Unfortuntately, I can't remember exactly when or where that ruling was, but I certainly remember the impact it had on my mind: utter disbelief.
ISTR that this ruling was linked to the prosecution of a CompuServe Germany exec for supposedly facilitating access to illegal pornography. Obviously, he had nothing to do with it, but he was held responsible anyway on behalf of CompuServer by a Bavarian court. Go figure.
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
If you do not allow deep linking the site will be unable to keep there users to even look at banner ads. If it takes more than 3 clicks to get to the information the end user wants, they have hit the back button the and left your site. In this case if the movie is not within the 3 click range, more that 50% of the users will not see it and not look at banner ads. Most big sites have a large click gap, so most people leave before they get to what they wanted. This is a problem because it is usualy the case that only after the end user has located what they were loking for, will they consider checking out banner ads.
**(All of the previos is under the assumption that user is comming from one site to another that does not allow deep linking.)
I have to wonder why they didn't take that route. Is their web team clueless? (Surely the first thing you do is call your webmaster and say "how can we stop this?") Do they just like lawyers? Or is this part of some bigger, submarine int-prop scheme -- what advantage are they going to take if this sets a precedent?
Hey, does anyone know which, if any movie studios are behaving rationally on this issue?
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
For the record- I've actually read this far. (I'm at work) :)
To Whom It may Concern:
Boy, are you in virtual hot water! Your position on deep-linking to parts of your web-site that bypasses your main page has made you the subject of debate (and anger) on the nerd site slashdot.org. That can't be good for PR.
Before you called out your lawyers, you should have talked to the people who run your web-site: what you wish to accomplish is quite possible and relatively easy, technically.
The World Wide Web was designed to make deep--linking possible and painless. That said, there are circumstances, such as yours, where doing so can lead to misunderstanding and confusion regarding copyright ownership, and avoidance of banner ads. Understandibly, this is not in your best interest.
Technically, it is possible for a web server to check the referring link to one of your pages, and if not another of your pages, to refuse to provide the requested data, or otherwise wrap it in an appropriate page (which might include a copyright notice, banner ad, etc.) Even if your web server can't be configured to do this, read-only CGI-BIN scripts can be used to accomplish the same effect.
Hope this helps. Remember, if there is a need to restict access, there is likely a technical solution available, or easy to implement, without having to resort to what amounts to using a legal sledge-hammer to swat a fly.
Regards,
Rene S. Hollan
[address omitted]
In Liberty, Rene
It's worth noting that while using some other guy's image is a quick and dirty way to make your web page look like it has more content, it also places your web page at the mercy of those whose content you've linked. You might link to somebody's nifty icon, but if he replaces it with pr0n, your pages are going to look pretty bad. Professional sites go out of their way to avoid this, often explicitly notifying the user when links leave their site.
I know someone who posted an auction on eBay, complete with a picture they went to the trouble of scanning, cropping, etc. Someone else with a similar item to sell linked to his image, so we went back and added some text to the image -- nothing profane, just a note that it was an original scan intended only for use in a specific auction. The lazy bum who linked to it had no alternative but to either close his auction or put up with the modified image, although I doubt that he ever noticed. With CGI, we could have been much more creative.
Bottom line: this will sort itself out without lawyers, if given a chance.
1)In the virtual host section (or general section) of your site add the following line:
.htaccess file of the directory you want to protect put the following:
SetEnvIf Referer yourdomain\.com internallink
2)In the
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from env=internallink
3) When somebody clicks on a link to a fiel within that directory the will get a 403. This will also prevent people from being able to type in the URL or use it as a "Favorite". So if you were using this for images you'd probably want to keep your images in it's own subdirectory so they are protected, but the HTML file which uses them isn't.
Did that make sense?
If anybody else has done something similar I wouldn't mind hearing from them
brian@alienwebshop.com
:-) Not to miss the point here, but Universal wouldn't have had me see the advertisement either way. I'm using this cutting edge piece of technology thing called a proxy! Yes, you, too can have the fun of not looking at advertisements. It also doubles as a fun way of letting all my LAN machines load webpages quickly. www.junkbuster.com for the plain-jane ver, :-)
www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/ for the blank-image patched ver + central blocklist
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You can also set up your domain to be a handler
:)
(check out Doug McEachern & Lincoln Steins _Writing Apache Modules With Perl & C_ for detailed instructions) such that the actual link itself is just a query to a program. They could then do a scheme a-la pathfinder where the URLS are garbled unless you surf through all the advertising crap.
I'm all for that method. If you gotta have the crap to support the content, by all means post the crap
Dan
Unfortunately, without a target="_top" tag, the *default* behaviour for links within frames on a page makes the linked page stay within the frame when the user clicks it.
I can see it now. Some p0rn site with doctored Xena pics has a link to the Universal site, which stays framed, surrounded by animated gifs screwing themselves over and over and over and the lawyers will say that people will think Universal is associated with these porn sites and wil sue the W3C council to ban framing from the HTML standard.
So am I violating copyright by buying a magazine,
blacking out all the ads, and leaving it in a public place?
After all, I have bypassed all those potential click-through ads (for other readers of the magazine), no?
This is silly. Universal is stupid.
Universal sells movies. The more people are exposed to their movies, the more the company makes money.
It's too bad their web group probably needs the clickthrough/popup ads to get income to justify their expenses on web stuff (servers). Maybe if they were smarter about it, like clickthrough ads for quick interest surveys, intelligent links to moviephone.com for current movies, etc., and it just wouldn't be a big deal for them, either.
But no.
Proof once again that the old school business world has a lot to learn about the Internet.
or, unfortunetly Proof that the internet, at least what were used to may cease to exsist once big buessness has there way. If this case sucseeds, the effect would be detimental to the intnernet.
the internet is about sharing ideas, and the old ways of information distrobution really don't apply anymore unfortunetly these big busness don't want to hurt there revinue stream, and since they never really wanted the 'Net in the first place, are willing to bring it to its knees. (and of cource, since there the ones giving money to congres....)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Okay, real easy solution... if the document referrer isn't from one of their sites, they simply redirect to the home page, or whatever. It'd take like 5 minutes to configure the average web server to do this. And if you really wanted to get fancy you could make the site 100% CGI-driven and just make a page right on the spot with all the advertising you want!
Such a solution requires no lawsuits, and for the very minimal solution, just a few minutes of time from the guy who runs the server.
Sheesh. Maybe I should ask Universal for a job as Webmaster. The one they have now obviously can't do anything that requires changing config files or writing if-then statements. He's probably got every M$ certification in the book, too.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Um....what the h*ll are you talking about? Netscape (well, okay, Netscape is an (ex)company, and Navigator/Communicator/Mozilla are browsers) was *designed* to view Web pages. Are you saying that you don't like the fact that it's totally compliant with standards? Do you have a *better* alternative? MSIE certainly doesn't follow accepted standards any better. You want to use Amaya as your primary browser, go ahead. The rest of us will stand over here and laugh at you.
And actually, copyright law does allow "fair use," a category that I think most deep linking falls into. One thing that is interesting to me is that most banner ads don't tell you exactly what they are for. This is because of the clickthrough model of web advertising. Advertisers do not take into account the more intangible effects of someone seeing a banner as s/he scrolls down a page, so they don't build banners in a way that lets the viewer know what the ad is for at first glance.
Overall, I think Universal misses the point. They should not expect a non-porn, non-financial, non-ecommerce site to make money or even break even. They should instead create a site that has good content that makes people want to watch their movies and tv shows and buy their music, blah blah blah.
>I don't understand what you mean, if the data is on Universal's server, what are Universal claiming has been copied? The URL?
Not even that, really.
The link to the content (i.e. movie trailer) is put on Movie-List's site in such a way as to make it appear that the trailer is stored on Movie-List's site. Universal's pissed because nobody looks at their banner ads anymore.
I say if Universal can't make people want to come to their page, screw em. Either fix your server or shut the fuck up.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The iCab browser for the Mac has built in image filtering which can be set up to kill most banner ads if you want it to.
I would have to say that if he stole your content with a perl script to embed it into his page, that it would be a geniune violation of copyright laws. Other then that, it is perfectly reasonable to make sure that your page is at the top, if only to ensure that your frames don't get broken (if you use 'em). This guy shouldn't complain. As for keeping it out of court, thats what you can expect big business to do, hopefully they won't change the way the rest of us work on the internet.
Spyky
Well if deep linking is made illegal, we can
say good bye to search engines and bookmark files.
If a company really wants to serve content only in context, they can use the refering page information submitted by the client. If a request is referred from outside their site, they can:
1) refuse it
2) bounce you to the main page
3) give you a version of the page you want, only reformated with lots of stuff (perahaps a frame) to get you to look at the rest of their site when done.
Obviously #3 is the best solution for all concerned, but not everyone will make the effort.
On banner adds - I fear we may eventually see servers which refuse to serve content until they are sure the adds have been received. Of course you wouldn't have to display them, but you would have to waste bandwith taking them.
For those of you who say that Universal is just concerned about revenue from its ad banners, one trip to their site would show you that there are ABSOLUTELY NO AD BANNERS ON THEIR SITE. I don't really know what their problem is with people linking directly to the trailer files, but I don't think they'd have a problem if you just linked to the movie's web site, then people can just use the links there to get the trailers. (Just as a sidenote, I think Universal's sites for its movies are way better than the other studios).
If the Internet Porn industry can figure out a way to make it extremely difficult to figure out urls into their sites and force you to see advertising, why can't everyone else? Of course, this won't stop everyone from figuring out the urls, but for most people it will. Many adult sites implement file name changing and dynamic page reconstruction in order to get around the sole problem of people linking into their sites -- you have to see the ads and have to go through the root of the site.
And the adult sites have to be doing this programaticly -- it's too much maintaince to do it by hand.
Check referer URLs, use cookies, change your 404 page to redirect to the root of the site -- it's not like these are new ideas. Admittedly, this is kind of underhanded (which explains why the adult sites have done it) but that doesn't mean it's not good to do, and worth it. Especially if your sole reason is to get people to see ads.
Advanced capital accumalation is dire need of a change of models. To a large part promiscuous information begins to errode the old model of monoploy=profit. It is natural that entertainment companies who have an existing investement in information technologies (rooted in the 19th century) should begin to explore legal and otehr remedies for stabilization. The question remains' if the current evolution of information is devolving control to smaller, more relativly atonomous units, will it be able to stabilize itself into an order?
There is nothing wrong with preventing links to your server. Make it impossible for someone to deep link to you. That's a perfectly fine solution.
But to do it the way that they are trying is to basically say that it is against the law to focus in on a piece of information and present it without the accompanying advertisements.
What does that mean? Well it means you can't clip an article out of the newspaper. It means you can't photocopy something out of a magazine. It means that you can't even reference it in a term paper specifically by page numbers. You would have to just say that you got the information from Time magazine issue #105, go find it yourself. It would mean that you couldn't walk up to a friend and say, "I read this great article that said..."
Deep linking has been around since the dawn of time. Think beyond the web and look at everyday occurrences and you'll find it happening all over the place.
The real source of the problem is that ad agencies have developed a new model for advertising. Before they paid for the ad to run in a magazine that went to 10,000 people. They couldn't tell how many of the 10,000 read the ad. But with the web, they pay by each viewing because they can track on that. And that's the problem.
Deep linking bypasses the new model that ad agencies have developed and site admins don't like getting hit in the pocket book.
- Persnickity
My favorite link is the following: ......
ftp://warez.eu.org
It's my favorite I hope I won't get sued by Software compagnies for posting this URL -
If you don't understand the joke, do a nslookup on the given URL
none Yet.
It just sounds completely unconvincing, like painting a mural on the side of a building and then putting up conditions to "license" people to look at it "any violation of the criteria voids the license immediately and may cause litigation". You can't license people to do something you have no right to prevent them from doing in the first place, and putting something on the web, or a mural on your house, where it's available for public viewing, gives people the freedom to look at it. if you don't want people to look at it, don't put it there.
When Ticketmaster sued M$ for deep-linking into their site, the complaint was also about banner ads. I wonder how many /. readers would be upset that M$ decided to settle rather than support their rights to deep-link?
Just one question. Why is it every time someone has a technical solution, there always seems to be an "unless you're using MS software" note? Why doesn't MS ever do things in a standard way? Of all companies that have the money to follow standards, MS could. I'm not talking about times when they *deliberately* ignore standards to try to stomp them (Java and so on), but times when they *should*. And they don't. :-( Their servers, clients, everything...nothing ever seems to properly follow RFCs...
I've never used them before (AFAIK), but now they have another point against them.
I think Apple's site is pretty easy to find stuff on...esp compared to M$ and friends.
As for drivers for older machines...one of the easiest things to navigate is Apple's massive FTP site (with lots of mirrors). Just head on over to one, and start cruising.
I dunno, maybe my tastes are just different, but I really find Apple's website well done and simple. Lots of graphics, yes, but compared to most large company websites, easy to use and quick to load.
Now I have no problem with companies and businesses having a presence on the net [I'm not so old fashioned that I'm totally against commercial traffic] but I do think that it can become too commercial [as it seems to be doing]. The companies need to realize that the web was not put up to help their profits, but to encourage the dissemination of information. I hope there are some web designers reading this, and I hope they can keep this in mind when designing sites. We need to make sure that the primary goal of a website is information, whether it be information on a geek and his/her cat, or information about a company and it's products. If the information is clear and easy to get to, the hits/sales will come, otherwise we will start ignoring you.
Ender
The information doesn't "want" to be free. "I" want the information to be free...
Nothing to see here
All analogies are imperfect (like crystal), but I think the human brain seeks analogies as a way to understand things. If you walked out on the street, what familiar things would be similar in relavent ways to a Web document? (That is, not just an HTML document, but one that is on the World Wide Web.) I think a Kiosk flyer (with the Internet as the Kiosk and the WWW one part of it) is a close one.
...
Let's say there is a kiosk next to a newspaper dispenser that charges 25 cents for the daily paper. The newspaper publisher wouldn't be happy if you broke into the machine (which has an established price system and protocol, however imperfect or outdated), but the person who left a flyer on the kiosk should actually be happy that you took the time to scan their ad.
You can see this with the New York Times and their required registration to view their news stories, or the economist, which lets you see some things for free but requires a subscription for others. They have moved to something like a newspaper dispenser model.
If a movie company doesn't want people looking at their kiosk, take a hint, guys - Move it into the lobby! Trying to regulate or officalize what people may put on their Web page is silly. Will you also disallow people from typing the name into their browser's location bar? How about reading the URL over the radio? How about into a speech recognition program?
As people have pointed out, there are plenty of ways to restrict access without invading other people's lives with lawsuits. It might not be smart to restrict people who want to see your trailers, though, since the trailers are supposed to sell movie tickets and rentals, but I can't tell you not to cut off your own nose
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
But the basic problem is, I need absolutely no license to link to anything on anybody's site. The only possible exception is if I electronically "sign" an agreement (like you do with the NY Times site). If I don't have to do that, I can refer to the data however I care to.
Electronic signatures aren't (yet) legally binding. Clicking an "Agree" button means absolutely nothing, currently.
So the Universal people obviously don't like contents of their site to be published in academic journals which lists accurate URL's, obviously? Idiots.
Who cares? Say there's an Austin Powers movie clip on the site. Do you think that viewers are going to think "Gee, Movie-List must have hired the actors and made a clip!" No. They know where it came from.
What about the fact that Movie-List might not show a copyright notice that Universal wants to show? People that are knowledgeable enough to set up another web page and copy and show the movies themselves are going to be able to read the location URL and know where the movie is.
I just don't understand the issue. Universal is losing nothing but ad revenue. If they don't like it, they can embed ads in their movies, like they do to their pages (evidently their pages are bad enough that no one wants to go there). Web sites are not atomic (This is the Universal website, and you must accept all information in it to get at x piece of information). Each piece lives a life of its own.
And technical battles are a lot more *fun* than legal battles are (well, maybe not as profitable for the lawyers involved...)
Maybe Universal's legal department is just trying to earn its keep.
Congress shall have power ... to promote the wealth of large, corporate holding companies, by securing, for an ever extending period of time at the request of Sonny Bono in behalf of the Disney corporation, the exclusive right to any stale content their lawyers can possibly claim as property. - Article 1, Section 8 Perverted US Constitution.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Washington DC - After more than two years in and out of the courts, The Supreme Court today upheld the lower courts' ruling that the viewing of a website in any other layout and format other than the one set-up by that site's authors.
The original suit was brought by a cartel of web business all over the country, initially sponsored by by the Direct Marketers Association (DMA). The defendants were Junkbusters Inc and thirty-four other businesses and individuals who had created software to let users by-pass blinking pictures, pop-ups advertisements, and intended controls on font, color, size, and backgrounds.
This means that the lower courts' previous award of seventeen billion dollars is due immediately. Upon hearing the ruling, Junkbusters immediately filed for bankruptcy, but it is widely believed that their the software authors and corporate directors will be personally liable. Furthermore, the text-based web browser, Lynx, is now illegal to use except on your own sites, as are any proxies that filter or rewrite incoming webpages in any way, including the suppression of blinking text. Both Microsoft and AOL Microsystems must immediately issue mandatory patches to their browser to disable the users from being able to disable automatic loading of images or moving GIFs.
A joint statement issued by the not-for-profit American Association for the Blind and the International Epileptics Support Center decried the decision as essentially barring their members from the web. The DMA praised the decision, stating that ``the needs of Commercial Enterprise would no longer be stymied by Communists and other PBS and NPR sympathizers.''
President Gore also weighed in with his pleasure at the decision, adding, ``This just blasted away the roadblocks in my Information Superhighway. Next term, we're going to the stars!'' This appeared to be an oblique reference to his constituents' efforts to gather re-election funds through click-through advertising fees. The president was in closed conference this afternoon with top members of Congress and with his InfoBahn Czar about how soon they could implement a new mandatory A-chip to be placed in televisions and VCRs so TV and video advertisements could no longer be avoided by consumers through editing, muting, fast-forwarding, or channel-surfing.
A hacker squad known only as the Spamvert Amnesty League (SAL) briefly seized control of the Whitehouse website, where they replaced the campaign advertisements with malicious notices of revenge against all spamvert supporters everywhere. At the same time, a digitized parody video of Clockwork Orange appeared on the Fox channel's satellite download in which consumers were held prisoner as commercial advertising was blasted into their propped-open eyes and ears. Credits on the video listed the SAL, and their choice of the European anthem, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, has led authorities to look in Europe for their homebase, since as we all know, uncounted intellectuals, artists, anti-commercial socialist sympathizers, and other commie rats have long taken refuge there from the righteous wrath of invasive American Plutocracy.
this isn't HTML pages that this guy is linking to. He is linking directly to the Quicktime files.
So what? It should be ok to link to text/html, but not quicktime files?
The point is that Universal set up a web server and they set it up in such a way that any browser that requests any document on that server would be served that document, be it HTML, Quicktime or otherwise. If they then get upset that the web server is doing just that, then who do they have to blame.
All linking is is telling the browser where it can get a particular piece of information.
The important thing to remember here is who is in control. Universal. They run the server. They control the content and behavior of the server. The government uses law to protect people from things beyond their control. There is no excuse for Universal whining to the courts to change the fact that their servers will spit out information to whoever wants it.
In fact, I would expect that sites that host copies of content, and serve it on their own bandwidth dollars, would actually be more objectionable to the original content providers, since this would remove their control over the information. Universal can always 404 these links any time they like, but they can't do that if someone is hosting copies.
This is obviously a case of the PHB's not understanding the technical details.
This argument strikes me as bogus, but, as IANAL, I'll just talk about an analogy: Do TV networks have the right to sue VCR manufacturers who put technology in their players that detect and screen out commercials? Or what about the VCR itself, which allows users to see the shows without watching the ads? The fact is that if they want to prevent access from outside, they can do what everyone else does: require registration, or use cookies.
Different technology. With the banner ads, you get x cents for every load - so, if someone doesn't load the ad, the money isn't there. If you skip commercials with your VCR, the money has already been paid out - they don't care if you directly watch the commercials or not. Of course, they do in terms of ratings, but those don't measure directly what you're watching every second.
Hmm? It saves cookies in a "cookie jar", but you can specify servers to allow cookies, I have to do that for at least slashdot. :)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If you post something on it, expect nothing less than it to get used in every way you don't expect. I'd like to know the exact point when this large billboard became commercially funded, thus giving corporations the right to dictate the use of the material they post. Anything past normal copyright infringements (which this story is not about) is bull-crap. If it's posted (note the word posted, like a concert advertisement being stapled to an eletrical pole) then you have no control of how people access it.
"Please don't sigh like that, maam"
>Sure the trailers belong to them, but can they
>copyright the URL? I wouldn't think so, but who
>knows.
Of course they can. I actually heard someone here in New York, at last year's Fall Internet World, say, "We're golden as far as these trademarks are concerned! I mean, come on. Why do you think it's called H TM L?"
Some of these people really need a hobby or a brain.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
I don't understand what you mean, if the data is on Universal's server, what are Universal claiming has been copied? The URL?
To Universal, it's kinda like the layout of a grocery story - they put the staples like milk and bread way in the back of the store so you have to walk by everything else and do some impulse buying.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
What the typical slashdot-I-didn't-read-it-but-I-have-a-comment crowd doesn't seem to understand is that this isn't HTML pages that this guy is linking to. He is linking directly to the Quicktime files. On top of that he makes no mention as to where the files are actually coming from.
This is an extremely sleazy thing to do in my opinion. I wonder how he would like it if slashdot linked directly to his http://www.movie-list.com/smalllogo.jpg image whenever it posted a movie story. I think this guy would get really pissed at the amount of traffic this would generate on his server. Bandwidth usage = $$.
Now, that being said, Universal did not handle this correctly. Calling in the lawyers will not fix their problem since I could easily post the same links to newsgroups, etc.. They really need to look for a technology solution. Heck, I can think of at least twenty pr0n sites that would be able to give them a clue.
In any case, both sides screwed up. If we end up having some clueless legal precedent set by this then BOTH parties should be blamed.
I'm inclined to blame movie-list more on this one. Universal has already talked to them once before and from their point of view this new stuff could look pretty spiteful. I still don't think they should have called in the lawyers but I understand why they did.
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
There's something inherently slimy about linking directly to content rather than to the original page that contains it.
It's intellectually dishonest, in fact. It's not the stubbornness of old media saying this, it's everybody but the pants-less newcomers in love with the idea of content free for the taking. Even if it's not truly free. Merely linking to pages is perfectly acceptable: that's what the web is about. By linking to pages, not content, you provide the originating site with due respect, earned revenue and earned visits, publicity and promotion, increased identity and branding. You provide your visitors with the full experience and an opportunity to view an item in context. Withholding context is like hit singles: what is the rest of the album for? Why did the creator spend all the time and effort and money? Shouldn't the opportunity for immersion be offered?
When I see what I consider stolen links, there's always a sense of unease, discomfort, and dislike. Part of it is that these sites keep poor company: the worst offenders are porn sites, warez sites and the banner-laden pages of wimps with puny get-rich-via-banner schemes in their heads. But it's also because it's unfair, unreasonable, arrogant; it's the maneuver of the stupid and the cowardly, the uncreative, the lazy, those lacking in judgment and intelligence, the pimples on the ass of humanity.
If you wish to include an excellent trailer or movie or gif, provide your users to the link of the page of the owners of that content: your site gets credit for the referrer URL, your site becomes and avenue for path-making to other sites and your site still is given credit for the new information by your visitors.
Where are the rules of gentlemanly and gentlewomanly conduct that guide most of us? They should apply here, too. It feels wrong to link to images on another site. At least, it should.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
Sorry... went and checked out this site, and found that he is deep linking to the content on Universal's site. This is way out of line in my opinion.
Sorry pal, you should link to the pages if you don't have permission.
awalker@ou.edu
Except for one problem: Glut of lawyers, dearth of programmers.
Too lazy to log in,Sir Spank-o-tron
But the basic problem is, I need absolutely no license to link to anything on anybody's site. The only possible exception is if I electronically "sign" an agreement (like you do with the NY Times site). If I don't have to do that, I can refer to the data however I care to.
The mundane equivalent to deep linking is referring or footnoting. If somebody publishes a book, and I access it (buy a copy and read it), I have the right to give referential or navigational data to anybody I care to. I can tell you that the good stuff is in figure 38 or page 182. I simply can't give you figure 38 or page 182, but I can tell you where to get it. This interferes with no copyright law, since I am copying nothing.
Per the above book-based example, ownership of content does not imply ownership of its locational metadata. That is all a URL is; locational metadata.
The fact that the end user sees it as a copy of the information is an illusion. The reference (URL) gets interperted by the browser, and the data is retrieved. This is only possible because the data is publicly accessable (not public domain).
This is like me referring to a publicly accessible book (say, one that is in libraries). The difference is that the browser will actually search the stacks and retrieve the book for you--all under the covers.
A LINKING document might be usable for politeness, stating the terms that one should link up. However, such a document should not carry the force of law. The legal precedents all flow the other way.
--The basis of all love is respect
That solution is worse then the problem. If you do that, they you are implicitly agreeing to the idea that Universal has some right to determine who links to them... and you lost the game already.
Don't do that. Universal needs to show WHY they have the right to control who links to what. As others say, there are technical options, and other issues I seriously doubt they've thought of. Like "lost advertisement"... if you clicked on a link to see a trailer for "This Summer's Hot Movie", and it sent you to Universal's home page, would YOU browse through the who-knows-how-many-pages to get to the trailer? I think not!
Besides, why is Universal griping about "lost advertising" when people are linking directly to (drum roll please...) advertising? They're upset because we're bypassing their advertising to voluntarily watch their advertising? Good grief, they ought to LOVE the linking like that! You can't buy eyeballs that are that interested in your movies at any price, only fan websites can provide them!
Universal may be short-sighted idiots, but let's not retaliate with even more short-sighted "linking agreements." We DON'T want to grant them those rights. If they're that excited about it, put up a password page or secure it somehow. Those "rights" (if you can call them that) they already have; don't create new ones that will cause thousands of small fry to be sued even more often then before (see today's Phantom Menace story!).
...of the web or don't play at all.
Funny how people even try and relate this all to a traditional media.
-AP
Okay, just for the moment, let's say that the Old School, typewriter-using, book-reading, litigious, proprietary, work-20-years-at-the-same-company people are right and that it's wrong to link to content on another site.
First off, I need a definition of what is a "deep link" vs. a shallow link, but I digress.
So... all the benefits of the web and hyperlinking get categorically thrown out the door beucase linking directly to content "steals" the right of the website to throw garbage in your face.
Well, what about search engines, then? They're nothing but "deep links". They steal *everyone's* content and make money by forcing ads to be displayed while they hawk other people's stuff.
(so, by not having a robots.txt file, do you grant consent to have your content snatched up?)
I think that we're approaching a time when the old-school and new-school will have to come to some concessions about the way the world works. How do you enforce one country's law on international users and content that may originate from any country or no country?
And.... if search engines are guilty, then I'm 100% certain that ALL portals except for opensource-content ones are violating the same rules.
I'm sure things will get worse before they get better. Technology is much more advanced than the laws that govern it. Just look at how complex US law is, and then look at how little of that law relates to regulating modern technology.
Fear the US Lawyers who have free cycles to "port" all their progress-stifiling regulations to high-tech!
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for justice and rule of law, but when law gets so complex and obfuscated that nobody understands it and it takes months to interpret it, something's gone awary.
I dunno...you can still read 400k 3.5" floppies, though 15 years is about the max for back-compatibility (the 5.25 inch disks aren't exactly easy to access any more). CD-ROMs probably last longer than paperbacks from a physical degradation sense...though I doubt that readers for them will be easy to obtain 25 years from now.
And they had the nerve to threaten you? Wow. They should consider themselves damn lucky you haven't put those pages behind a CGI script that checks the HTTP_REFERER and lets in anyone except someone coming from their site. (Then, for people coming in from the assholes' site, you could display whatever other content you wanted...)
That's kind of like bitching out a cop for pulling you over, or complaining to your boss that she shouldn't have reprimanded you for tardiness. You've got all the power in this situation, and the folks trying to threaten you already have a strike against them for linking to you inside their frameset.
What did they threaten with, anyway?
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
Nope. It may be illegal to copy the content (so he can't do that). It's perfectly legal to deep-link, and he'll do that quite happily. I see why he did what he did.
Besides, if a group of lawyers came up and (in the big-company threatening manner) told you to remove movie files or get sued, I wouldn't feel like being obliging and removing the links at all.
You're being silly, the effect may be slow but of course they can assess the impact of advertisements over time. There is feedaback in the form of asking people where they heard of company / product, and more importantly tehre is feedabck in watching the effects on sales following a new advertising campaign. And of course, the advertisers have some idea whether they or their friends watch adverts or just skip them. An increasing trend to ignore adverts will be noticed and will affect revenues. Do you honestly think they just say "5000,000 viewers, that's a lot, here have some money"?
Your argument might be valid in other circumstances. It's BS here. *Obviously* Universal made the trailer. No one is going to think that he hired all the original actors and is making trailers of his own. If he said "I made this", I might see your point. But you'd have to be flat out *stupid* to think that he's implying that he made the movie.
And if you actually read the article, you'd know that he *was* putting the movie files on his own site (and paying for the bandwidth himself) before Universal told him to remove them. *Then* he put up the links to their movies, and they didn't like that either. Essentially what they're saying is that his site, a list of links to movie trailer files, must now become a list of links to pages with links to movie trailer files. It is far more useful to the user in its present form from a point of view of obtaining the movie, and therefore more useful to Universal (because they get more copies of their trailers distributed). I think they're just holding a grudge (since he actually had the files himself earlier), and indulging in a knee-jerk reaction against movie piracy on the 'Net by attacking anyone that's trying to distribute movie files related to their movie at all. Trying to set an example.
I think framing content is rude, but in some instances I do not object to it. For instance, consider a web site (profit or non-profit) which provided an authorative collection of materials on widgets. Lets say they went through the trouble of procuring and producing 100s of documents on widgets and cataloguing 1000 more that existed on the Internet. Lets also say that they developed useful navigation frames that indexed the widget documents in a highly ergonomic fashion.
I hit there site to do widget research in a number of categories. The first document I need is at State Univerisity. I click the link, and get the document inside of widget.com's frame. The document has a couple of references that I check out. When I'm done I use the frame to hop to the next category. While I could have gotten back to the original page with my back button, retyped the URL, etc. It was useful to hit the link in the frame, it saved me some navigation trouble. Furthermore, since it was there indexing service that brought me to State University's document, I have no objection to them glorifying themselves.
If they started serving a lot of advertisements or made overt claims that they owned the document its a different story.
telnet www.universalpictures.com 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
They're using Apache. No excuse for them, and their webmaster should have known better.
The geniuses in Redmond decided to make IE 5.0 spawn Media Player and pass the URL off to it, and have Media Player grab the movie by itself. This way, no referrer gets passed to the web server. So if you are thinking of implementing a referrer check such as this, just be aware of potential pitfalls such as this.
Wow 182 post, I'd be suprise if anyone actually reads this.
Anyway, I just skimmed the comments and I didn't see anyone mention this (if you did, I'm sorry for being redundant). But is it a copyright infringement if I make a deep link with a book mark. I mean I'll just go directly to the location. Or is it just a problem if I make my bookmarks available publically.
Anyway I believe that ANYTHING that is published on the net is worthy of being pointed to by a link. If you don't want something linked to, then have users create accounts (free like NYT). Or have some sort of CGI script to point to the information that dynamically changes.
So much for writing this since I don't think I'll have a soul to read it
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
Nope. Too much negative PR. And the draw is weak to the non-geek. I think this is just overly-adventurous lawyers...
n this case, I went to Movie-List to check it out, and it is a banner-driven (hence, I assume, ad-supported)
site that is, essentially, a "link farm". He takes the trailers for movies and wraps his own HTML around them (complete with banner ad), and doesn't even acknowledge the movie studios the trailers are coming from. If I see a trailer from Universal's web site, I should have the option of hitting a link to their site to look around; Movie-List traps you there so you can look at his banner ads.
I think he *should* attribute the studios...but that's courtesy, not a legality. You really care where it's from, you have a view source command to use...
I would think that this is a violation of fair use (which is going to have to be redefined somewhat, if it hasn't already, to handle the Web) made worse by the fact that he's not incurring any bandwidth penalty himself; he's using their servers to host the information he's supposedly getting ad money off of, the trailers. My gut feeling is that Universal is in the right on this one.
Try reading the article. He *did* try mirroring the movies on his own server. Universal made him remove them. He complied (hey, they asked for it), and linked to their movies.
1) People should be allowed to point to copyrighted material on another site without obtaining explicit
permission if they acknowledge the copyright holder of the material (either by providing the link in the context of their site, as my Alertbox examples do, or in the case of an image or movie, providing a link to the source of the copyrighted material). If search engines were to use the "copyright" LINK attribute (if properly set) on a page, I'd think that covers their backsides neatly.
This is a very good idea.
2) People should only be able to place a page from another site within their own frame if the owner of the content of that site gives their permission (as I did when I set up my home page at XOOM) or for educational or informative purposes (a site that teaches good/bad web design, or a live "portfolio" of a webmaster's work). In the latter case, the frame should not have any ads on it.
Uh...nice idea but no go. You can just use "reload in new frame." The only legality should be that a webmaster must not attempt to decieve a user into thinking that he created the content. Also, he should not be able to modify it and redistribute it (using a perl program to yank out the ads and spit back the data).
3) A subscription-based site shouldn't include any copyrighted material from another source without that source's permission, period. Just live a print magazine.
I don't see why. Subscription and ad-based sites are the same to me...and there's a good argument for some ads to support the cost of a server...I really think that this is a nice idea, but distinguishing between "commercial and non-commercial" is a bit unfair, at least using "subscriptions" as criteria.
By the same token, if you were pointed to a story on page 11 of a newspaper, and went straight there, the newspaper would be able to sue. What incredible silliness.
If they were really serious about keeping people from linking out, they'd stick the pages in a database and assign a time-limited session ID to each user (like with Notes URLs). They're obviously not serious about it.
--
There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Karin Spaink, a net activist in the Netherlands,
was recently found to have infringed copyright
by providing a link to a admitted copyright
infringing page. Now, this is a little different
in several ways, but a relatively clueful court
did find that a link could be infringing in and
of itself.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Why would Universal object to a site for movie lovers linking to Universal ads on the Universal site? The links are to promotional material for Universal movies. It can only be to Universal's benefit to get people to see them.
Can any PHB or lawyer be this dumb?
I have to wonder if Universal, or all other sites that have intrests in preventing deep linking into their sites will take suit against the search engines next, since all they are are a whole BIG bunch of deep links.
This is so much bullshit that I almost cannot stand it...
awalker@ou.edu
Well, it's already an ad innit?
We've covered that ground methinks..
More to the point, they have the money to hire webmonkeys of the calibre they require, so why not force them to use gateway cgis and cookies to force US to see the ads, if they're so paranoid about 'protecting' their investment?
Bruce M. Simpson Unix/Network Bod & Win32 Developer
the guy who runs this site seems to be pretty reasonable, since he agreed to delete the files from his server, etc. so, presumably, he would be willing to stop linking to the actual media file and link to a page that has all of the advertising, etc, etc. AND presumably, this page already exists on the universal website, unless all of the movies have just one index page (in which case he would probably agree to link to that). as long as they're not using frames, they shouldn't really lose out on any ads or whatever. and frames suck, anyway.
i suppose they lose out on the advertising/marketing/whatever from making someone wander through your main page to what they actually want to get to, but that's just getting ridiculous. these are movie TRAILERS. they are ADVERTISEMENTS in themselves. universal should want people to see them in whatever way possible. blah blah blah. this kind of stuff just makes me frightened of future. it's nice that most of the web is free, but the proliferation of advertising is starting to get to me. now i have to see a banner advertisement to have the permission to see another advertisement?
"Hello, everyone, and welcome to our Universal Studios Web Site! We payed lots of money to have people write this site, lots of money to show our trailers in the theatres and television shows, and lots of... HEY! What do you think you're doing? Don't you be linking to our site, dammit! We don't want you to show anyone about this movie unless we have to pay you lots and lots of fees!"
Of course, another argument would be...
"Well, after twelve weeks of excruciating pain, that new 13 gig drive is up with all the movie trailers. Hope our *expensive* connection is good enough to serve it out quickly. HEY! What do you think you're doing? We've spent over fifty hours getting this thing ready, and now you're linking directly to the file? That means that bandwidth goes up and... oh hell... how are we going to pay for this? They bypassed all our advertisements and went straight for the file! If they just copied the thing to their server... wait, no... that would be a copyright infringement. Well, let's just let the court decide..."
Two ways to look at it. If someone was linking to a 6MB file on your server, your attitude might be adjusted more towards the second.
Of course, if your homepage is running on an Underwood typewriter hooked up to the net through magic means, you'd understand you HAVE no server space worth mentioning, and look at it from the first view.
Did I miss anything?
Of course not... I know all and see all.
iad
What Universal wants is akin to requiring a person to read every part of a magazine from the front cover to the end of the article they're interested in.
I'm certainly free to recommend in my own writings that the reader look at the second paragraph on the first page of the first article in the Forum section of this month's Playboy, for example. Universal would like to make it illegal for me to provide a hyperlink to the comparable web page. In print, I give the reader the page number, article title, magazine title and issue number in order to point him to the text I would like him to read. The information I have given him is just a "real-world URL." It is simply the location at which the text I am referring to can be found. On a web site, I could provide the same information to "link" to a printed article, or if referring to a web page I could write out a URL for the reader to cut-and-paste into his browser's location bar, or I could take out the cut-and-paste work by using tags to make the link automatic with the click of a button.
The only problem I can see with linking to a deep page is if the referring page represents the content behind the link as its own property. I can't photocopy the first article in the Playboy Forum and include it in my writings; that would be obvious plagarism. Likewise, I shouldn't link to the article without providing some indication that the material behind the link is Playboy's property. This may even include simply ensuring that the page I'm linking to is readily identifiable as Playboy's website and not mine (I'm still undecided on this point, and anyway it's more polite to make it clear at the link).
Advertising revenue, which I can understand is a concern for Universal, must not be considered as an issue in the law. Universal is free to publish a web site and charge advertisers to put banners there, but cannot require people to look at the advertisements. That's why those annoying blow-in cards that fall out of magazines are so widely used. It's practically the only way to guarantee a reader will see that ad. Otherwise, most people quickly scan a page to identify the ads on it and then ignore them, focusing on the article they are interested in. The web equivalent is the annoying pop-up window advertisements on GeoCities member sites and elsewhere.
I think of a website as like a magazine or newspaper. Newspapers derive a negligible income from per-issue price; most of their money comes from advertising. Yet I may still refer someone to a particular article on a particular page without telling them to read the whole paper until they figure out which article I'm talking about. Universal would like to think of a website as a house. You come in the front door, not a window, and pay attention to everything your host tells you.
Legally requiring every visitor at a web site to read the main pages before reading the article they came for is as ridiculous as selling a magazine with the requirement that the reader read every page of the magazine that precedes the article he is interested in.
=========================
Actually the very first VCRs could skip over commericals while taping. Ad signals were different from progrma signals at the time, but that was quickly changed. Kinda sad really.
IMHO, unless I am grossly missing something here, this case seems grossly stupid. I hope the judge is technically competent enough to see it as such and throws it out.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Of course this sets no precedent in the US ... but you may never know when you're pointing to a site that happens to be situated in Holland and find yourself under their juristiction (where's the /. server for example - anyone know or care? maybe we would if one state in the US created such a precedent in a state court).
For more information on the (now very long running ) Scientology vs. the Net free-speech fight check out www.xenu.net [hint: it gets wonderfully funny at times such as when their lawyers are trying to determine the real identity of "Major Domo" so they can supoena him ... and when they discover that their opponents know of an FTP site that has all their secret files (ftp://127.0.0.1)]
Use dynamically generated content for the documents on your site, with URLs to the 'valuable' resources that change with each serving of the master document.
The resource URL refers to an access control script on the server, which returns the valuable resource, but which expires after a maximum of, say, 5 downloads. When the master document is next loaded, a different URL for the resource is supplied, referring to the same script, but with a non-expired key, thus allowing anyone access to the valuable resource who has come through the master document.
Easy. Next question?
Deep inside this obscure site the truth can be found...
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Here are some ways to prevent people from abusing your site:
There are probably many other solutions to this problem, but this is what I was able to think about right now.
Note that some of these solutions (cookies, JavaScript) are not supported by all browsers or can be disabled by the user. But as long as the trick works for the majority and does not block the other users, your ad revenues are safe.
-Raphaël
I doubt that making deep linking a legal infraction can possibly occur in the US legal system.
1) It doesn't fit in with trends in US law. For instance, non-compete agreements have to meet very very strict standards in order to be valid. An agreement whose only purpose is to eliminate competition between the parties involved is not enforcable simply because it goes against principles that this country is founded on. That is a case, a common one at that, where the law favors what is good for the country over the good of individuals. Disallowing deep-linking would be detrimental to the good of the Web as a whole.
2) There are lots of sites on the web where anyone can go and submit a link to be listed (unfiltered versions of Yahoo). This would make those sites useless, since they would all have to be regulated by their owners.
3) There are technological ways of preventing this from happening anyway. This can be done with referrer information, though that could be bypassable if the browser maker chooses to make it that way. Another way would be to make sure the browser has some sort of session cookie that is only issued in certain areas of the website (like the front page). If the browser doesn't have the cookie, it redirects to the front page. There's a little more to this (so don't argue specifics on this strategy), but this would be a pretty simple Apache module.
4) Lawmakers doesn't like creating situations where there is the potential for a monumental number of lawsuits. There are probably hundreds of millions of these deep links around, and even if only a fraction of a percent of them were cases where someone might sue, that would still be a lot. Because of (2) and (3), I really doubt anything indicating that deep-linking would be illegal could occur.
I don't think you've made a valid distinction. Maybe skipping ads doesn't directly affect the TV networks but the people who pay to have the ads displayed will still feel ripped because they didn't get whatever value they expected when they paid for their ads.
A ruling for the advertiser in this case would have a devastating effect on the web. It would be far less impact on everyone if people who don't want their stuff linked to were expected to take simple technical steps to make deep linking hard. I have no problem with suits against people who attempt to bypass these technical tricks.
Isaac
If you really want to protect it better, forcing people to use an account /w ip checking to ensure multiple people aren't using the same one would work better.
It's about time someone defined what is copyright enfringement on the web and how public data is when it is put on the web. I haven't checked the site, but perhaps some sniplet on the bottom explicitly saying that linking is illegal?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
then stay off the web. Easy solution.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ok, so i missed first...
.oO(less links, less traffic, less banner clicks) Some people really need to think before they act.....
Let me get this right, they don't want any links to their copyrighted content without their express written permission? Their main page is copyrighted!! They don't want anyone to link to them? think
Hrmm.. is there any software out there that can be installed as a proxy which filters banner ads?
I think this is where we are headed...
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
As for the last link, what do you expect based on his heros. I'm just suprised he didn't start his comment with EULA.
www.junkbuster.com
-matt
(Look at slashdot - no matter how deep you go, the banner is always there.)
If they want all visitors to see ads, then put the ads on each page like that. Otherwise don't. But they shouldn't ruin the entire WWW by setting the precident that deep links are illegal without permission ahead of time. Deep links should be legally no different than telling a friend "Hey, check out page 47 of the November 4th issue of NewsWeek." When I read a magazine or newspaper am I breaking the law when I skim past the ads and ignore them?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
[Start off the post with a bad pun - what has /. come to? :) ]
:) As the article points out, the whole point of links is to make it a world wide WEB.
Anyone note that the prime objection Universal appears to have had to the linking was that people could see the content without seeing 2 or 3 banner ads that Universal has on their site?
So what are Universal and other going to do about the ever-increasing (in personal experience - I don't have hard figures here) use of proxies like Junkbuster and Proxomitron (local windows-user uses this) that besically exist for the sole purpose of filtering out unwanted banner ads? With sites like weather.com which throw a dozen ad banners at you when you try to get your local weather information, it's only going to make more people look for ways to get rid of them.
As to the issue of linking - I don't think I'd have a legal leg to stand on if someone linked to content on my site - assuming I didn't want them to. Me, I like watching the webalizer bars go up.
-- Rick
The way I understand it:
However, there is some state information that can be used, in particular cookies anf the HTTP Referer header. The latter is AFAIK not mandatory, though - for instance, Opera lets the user turn them off.
I heard about this last week. He said that the Internet was a passing fad and likened it to the CB radio of the 90s! I'll post a link if I find one.
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
Personally, I think I'll start boycotting Universal Studios' products (films/videos/merchandise). It's going to be tough, but I really think they went to far.
Get it here!
This argument strikes me as bogus, but, as IANAL, I'll just talk about an analogy: Do TV networks have the right to sue VCR manufacturers who put technology in their players that detect and screen out commercials? Or what about the VCR itself, which allows users to see the shows without watching the ads? The fact is that if they want to prevent access from outside, they can do what everyone else does: require registration, or use cookies.
Anyhow, vote with your mouse clicks: if they want you to go through seventeen pages before they'll give you what you want, you shouldn't bother. I won't use apple's site if I can get away with it, it's one of the worst I've seen in terms of its organization for technical support (just *try* to find a driver for an older piece of hardware there).
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Data is not information until somebody becomes informed. Before data is received by someone (or something) capable of understanding it, the data can not be said to have meaning and therefore is not, in any literal sense, "information". Thus, in a sense, information _does_ in fact "want to be free".
Not funny ... informative, worthwhile, insightful, prescient (perhaps), scary-as-hell (how's that for a moderator option). But not funny.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
It seems to me that any court ruling on such matters have the distinct possibility of making search engines illegal. More importantly it would seem that such a ruling has the potential to destroy the WWW as we know it. This strikes me as being scary.
On the other hand I firmly believe that anyone linking another site should make it obvious that the link you are following leads to someone elses site. More importantly you shouldn't trap that site in a frame, so that it appears to be part of your site.
My initial reaction was "how effing stupid must Universal be for suing over links.". The ability to link is central to the Web. However, I thought of one important distinction under which I could see a law suit for linking. If the site containing the links runs a for-profit site where the pages on the other end of the link are content for the for-profit site, this does seem to be a copyright violation. To me, this case is no different than when any other kind of media is reused/resold for profit.
If you have a movie Web site where people paid for movie info such that a user would pay to follow the link to Universal's site, this seems to be a clear violation (to me, it's like making copies of a video and selling them). However, if you have a car dealership web site and you have a link from your site to a a movie that uses one of the cars you're selling, I don't think this is a violation. The Web site itself is not a source of income for the car dealer even though the car dealership is a for-profit business. The primary interest in following the link is not related to the core business of the content on the other end of the link (i.e. you're not following the link for a movie-related reason, rather, for a car-related reason). However, if the link were to a movie showing how to take care of that kind of car, it may be a violation.
> Why dont we put a link on all of our webservers. If they want to be consistent they would have to sue us all.
Simple: They don't have to sue us all at the same time. If they win the first one, THEN they sue the rest. With the precedent established, the additional cases are open-and-shut.
And the penalties for copyright violation are draconian - partly BECAUSE it's so hard to find all the little guys who make copies. So they punish the ones they catch with astronomical fines - to serve as glaring examples, to make piracy uneconomic, and to recover the lost revenue from the few they DO catch.
The classic case was a choirmaster in a little chruch, who bought a copy of some sheet music and found it was sored out of his singers' ranges. So he transposed it and made up a few copies to hand out to the choir. He sent a copy with a nice cover letter to the author, praising the work and offering his easier-to-sing transposition for future editions. The author sued, and won. I think the fine was $100,000 - and this was back in the days before hyperinflation, so think megabux.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I was reading these just before this story popped up.n g t
http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/index.html
http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/linking.html
http://www.bitlaw.com/internet/webpage.html#linki
http://www.bitlaw.com/links/articles.html#Interne
http://www.patents.com/weblaw.sht#lo
http://www.bitlaw.com/hot/totalnews.html
Here's why I was reading about this:
http://libertyonline.hypermall.co m/copyright.html
And for more fun, view the source of this one:n tent.html
(extracted from a frameset)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/4446/co
So if the US legal system agrees with Universal then US web sites cannot link to US web sites ? Anyone else in the world will still be able to so, it is only US users that suffer this stupidity. Or are they dumb enough to think that other countries will somehow comply with laws that have no relevance in other countries ?
Just like the damn fool pgp laws, every one in the world has PGP but the US has stupid laws that seem to believe that the US is the only place that has PGP. The only winners in all this stupidity are the lawyers.
Isn't it about time that companies left M$ to feed the lawyers ?
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
(Maybe their Microsoft webserver won't allow to do that...)
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
This is all quite silly. I can go to a library and do an infotrac search (equiv of web search). It returns a list of articles matching my search criteria. I then go to the newspaper archives, go to spool 9/1994, and zip to page 5A, column 3, paragraph 4 (equiv of deep link) and read my article. I do not see the advertising there either. How is this different from what web search engines do?
I don't think you've made a valid distinction. Maybe skipping ads doesn't directly affect the TV networks but the people who pay to have the ads displayed will still feel ripped because they didn't get whatever value they expected when they paid for their ads.
Well, i think it's very valid. For one, the advertisers don't even know if you've skipped their commercials or not - the ratings system, which is just about the only point of feedback, doesn't register commercials. So, if your ratings show that 100,000 people watched this TV show last night, it won't show that maybe 50,000 were skipping the commercials. They don't know how many actually saw it - all they have to go by is the ratings system itself.
If people are so concerned about losing advertising revenue, then perhaps they should look into a way of fighting the "perpetrators" on their own terms--technologically. Put some anti-framing javascript in the page, or have the web server check the HTTP_REFERER variable to ensure that the pages are being snagged from their own links. Or--here's a novel idea--put the advertising in the HTML. A pretty simple ad serving CGI would handle rotation of ads very simply. That way, when people link to your internal page, they are getting one of your ads at the top of the page. Of course, this breaks down when people start running all their pages through an ad-f iltering proxy server or something similar... :)
I'm sick of people whining about how people are stealing their content. Get over it, or get into a different business. This is one of the prices of doing business on the web.
(darren)
daveo thinks that is hould be the responsibility of the site-owner to take care of this. it is suggested that they use java or cgi scripts to download files to users and check the referrer. would that not be much more easy then a court trial? maybe the lawyers payed the tech guys so not too tell universal it could be done ;0)
-DAVEO
The Internet is public in nature.
If you post content, then it is public in nature.
If you wish to prevent people from traveling through your site in a manner other than what you wish, feel free to design it properly. But, don't tell us that we need permission to place a link. I won't ask for it, nor will I ever ask for it. Universal, it is the WEB (you obviously don't know what the web, or the internet, really is)- don't you dare break it!
Isn't this akin to suing a card catalog for listing your book and giving a brief description.
Or someone publishing a book about movies and including your movie as one produced?
This is a matter of technology vs politics. This suit is attempting to use politics to control technology. It's stupid. You can use technology to control technology. Make an apache module which refuses to serve up the linked pages unless the linking site has recently accessed the page in which the linked page is linked. Stop paying lawyers and start paying programmers.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
all deep links should be allowed. data online is data online, even if universal (or whoever) bury it under 17 layers of advertising for the "die hard IV:how much more money can we make outa this crap".
they want the ad revenues, let them get clever enough to store their content behind a front end that people might want to browse to/thru. it's effectively advertising advertising advertising anyway.
btw, how do i filter out firstposters.
cloak of invisibility not working, there are squirrels everywhere
There are already scripts that make things close to being impossible for linkers to do..
checkout antileech.php3 at freshmeat.net...
it checks referer: tag of the header to verify if the user clicked from the right site (even page) or from some outside.
Unfortunatelly antileech.php3 isnt the best (last time I checked = month) as it would send redirect to the actual file. Someone smart could grab the redirect link and link to that file directly.
Ofcourse what you can do is change where the physical file sits on the server daily (as in make movies/0727/trailers/movie.mpeg) for the redirect script which can know this, and this will make linkers hell..
Even more advanced is for the antileech.php3 script to load a file and return the file, not redirect to it.. ofcourse this forces the file to be stored locally on the same server as the php3 script.. (antileech doesnt do it, but by that it allows you to point to other servers)..
hmm... if they care so much for their data, protect it... sheesh...
Also last time I checked they have in all trailers info as to who done it (from upn) in the first few sec of the movie... and they should encourage linking, they are a company who wants a wide spread...
I would understand if someone would link to my collection of music videos.. I would be pissed as hell.. saturating my cable.. making browsing impossible... but they are a company, who sells... linking to trailers is a free ad...
something doesnt sum up...
For one thing, it's a free speech issue. If I can't link directly to another site, can I post the url in plain text and let people paste it into their location boxes ? If I can't do that, can I send a url to my buddy with the url in it as a link ? as plain text ? Can I publish a book with the url in it ?
The fact is that the trailers are publically accessible resources for which the poor defendant is simply publishing the location. If Universal doesn't want the resource to be publically available, they should make it so (as other posts have indicated), rather than throwing it up there for anyone to look at and then trying to legally prevent people from speaking about where it is and how to get to it.
Sites typically WANT the hits so, why not post a LINKING page that is akin to the COPYING document used for the GPL?
The LINKING page could give explicit license to link to the page as long as certain criteria are met - any violation of the criteria voids the license immediately and may cause litigation.
The first site linking to the second site could get monetary compensation for LINKING under license in order to provide incentive to link; the threat of being sued would be the disincentive to link improperly.
One of the criteria might be that contact with and permission from the administrator of the site being linked to is imperative.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
the webowner did not back down. If it goes to court, the trial judge rules against Universal, and the appellate judges agree with the ruling, we can prevent a lot of cease and desist letters. Maybe we can even remove the term "deep linking" from our bloated vocabulary.
I think this is better news than M$ settling their dispute.
I just meant that I (and I assume most of slashdot) prefer to have online, current, searchable content rather than bookcases full of old info.
I want just-published, up-to-the-minute content, and if I only need a few paragraphs of info, I see no reason to kill a tree for it.
Aside from classic literature and coffee-table pictorials, books today kinda suck.
1) the info in them is, by definition, out of date
2) hardbacks are really expensive
3) paperbacks are really cheap, quality-wise. Worth saving for 150 years? I think not.
4) books take too much space for too little knowledge. It's like comparing an old 45 rpm record to a CDROM full of mp3's. Nostalgia is one thing -- practicality is another.
The introduction of the cdrom and the ability to cheaply distribute mass quantities of data caused a shift in the value of information (US$50 for a 1.44M program that fits on a floppy disk suddenly seemed too expensive when you could get 640M of data for the same price.)
The vast amount of info on the web has caused the same effect for printed content. If I can get 90% of the book's info online from 10 different sources *for free*, why is the book worth $50, when I only need $5 or $10 worth of it?
Images still get a referrer header, so if the referrer is not from your domain, you send an image that says "please go directly to www.NotEnoughBandwidth.com" People would stop linking to your images really fast.
How much data do you have from 15 years ago that is still readable?
How many books?
'Nuff said.
I can understand the concern about linking directly to the trailer - if it makes it appear to the average joe that the linking site is providing the content, then the content-providing site has a right to complain. However... why doesn't the linking site simply point to the page on which the link to the trailer resides? That way, the user actually goes to the content provider's site, can eye-ball an ad, and everyone's happy.
This is much better then linking to the front page, IMHO. I don't know about you, but if I can't find what I'm looking for right away, I'd leave - and then the content provider wouldn't get my eye-balls anyway.
--- "Better to keep silent and appear mysterious than to betray your stupidity by speaking." - Me
Look. If you don't want people "deep linking" into your site, design it so they can't.
_ our_stuff
Make every link that people might possibly want to "deep link" to have to go through a CGI script that checks referer in order to return the actual data, not a link to it.
Script would go something like this:
if REFERER=our_site then return_data_hidden_from_normal_URLs
else return_message_saying_to_piss_off_and_not_link_to
simple. Then just make the actual URL of the file hidden in the script. Put those files in separate directories on the site, disallow directory browsing, and don't link to them directly. For security, make the CGI directory non-readable, just executable. Then they can't download the CGI Script to disassemble and find out the actual URL. The only way someone can get the actual URL now is by a lucky guess (which is usually pretty easy, considering most normal names for things) or hacking into your server.
Geez..
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If Universal is going to be such a litigous prick about who links where, and they're allowed to set a precedent concerning deep linking, who knows what kind of f%%ked up legislation will come out of this. We should petition all the search engines to boycott Universal.com. Since they don't want people linking, and they're too STUPID to understand that the nature of the net is public, and they don't want to field a technical solution instead of suing first, we should petition all the major search engines to ban universal from their database. It keeps their liability down, so I doubt any of them would object. Maybe the people running Universal would get the message after that.
Many people have hit the "real issue" (IMHO) right on the head. It is whether the content being linked to is really completely "public" information. Universal appears to feel this way, but is still exporting it on their web server as if it were. Universal intends the content to be viewed only by users in a particular protection domain: those who entered by the front door.
This problem stems from a poorly implemented (or poorly thought out) sharing model.
If you have information you want only your employees to see, you post it INSIDE the office, not on the billboard outside of the office.
Many people have pointed out the obvious technical solutions to the problem already; referer tags, sessions, free logins,...
The semantics of the web allow linking to any URL. I think that neither URLs, nor the use of URLs should be prohibited. Trying to use legal action to prohibit this, in order to "redefine the semantics of the web" is clearly misguided.
-david
The best defense against this idiocy is to point out that not all links are made manually by a human. What about links made programatically? If linking to a 'hate' site makes you just as guilty as creating the site in the first place, then you can claim that all search engines are guilty for all hate sites that they have on record that a search might return. That would pretty much be all the hate sites on the net excepting any that might be deliberately hiding from spiders.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
...and it's working! The fact that Universal is going the litigation route (the least sensible from a technological and economical standpoint) would help a cynic draw the conclusion that the numerous hits and press coverage they've generated in the past couple of days is all part of a marketing campaign to get Universal noticed and establish more of an online prescence. Look at the # of responses in this thread. Savvy marketing. Gotta think outside the box when it comes to getting attention. Too bad they don't follow the same adventerous approach when selecting projects for the big and little screen!
I forgot who said that originally (Barlow?), but it's something that needs repeating in cases like this.
HTTP and HTML were not designed to force people to view advertisements, they were designed to share and link information. If you don't like the limitations of a technology, don't use the technology.
The culture of the net says that the right to link is implicit. If you don't like the customs of a people, don't enter their territory.
Now, it is a bit dishonest to deep link into someone else's site without attribution, but it can't be illegal. For the courts to allow ownership of the address of a copyrighted work would make most periodical indexes, card catalogues, bibliographies, and footnotes illegal.
Universal published their content on the web with no access restrictions. If people go to that content and download it, I don't see a problem as long as the referring site didn't misrepresent the actual source of the content. A previous article on /. discussed displaying someone else's site in your frame with your advertisements. This wouldn't be OK, because in a way that misrepresents the source of the content. But if the Movie-List says "Go get movie trailers from Universal", then no one is deceived and I don't see how Universal can complain. Apparently in this case Movie-List didn't list the source of the content, so their case isn't as strong. But if the source is attributed, I don't see a problem.
As another poster mentioned, there's no reason that Universal can't set up a technical solution - generate random URLs for each visitor, only serve the content to browsers referred from one of their sites, etc. But if they make content freely available on the 'net with no access restrictions, I don't see how they can complain if people download it. What if I just typed in a random URL and happened to hit one of their trailers without going through their site?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
So this idiot writes a threatening e-mail to me because his site wants to refer people to my site (bus schedules) and keep a frame up top with their advertisements in it. Their reasoning is that they are driving traffic to my site, so they have a right to show advertisements around it. They are upset that I won't allow that.
Clueless idiots. Of course, if he had any brains, he could write a LWP perl script to just grab my content and embed it into his pages.
So the same with Universal. Plenty of technical solutions to prevent your pages from being pirated, as well as to pirate other pages.
But no, let's fight this out in court... :(
This reminds me of a ruling in Norway. The case was brought by a University against someone telnetting to their sendmail daemon and doing some other investigation (as part of a TV show) and it turned out the University was running known-security hazardous versions. The Norwegian courts said: If you don't want anyone to visit, *don't* open your ports.
:)
Hopefully we can have similar results in the "Land of the Free".