Thank you for your recent correspondence to Orbitz with regards to our new Terms and Conditions. Orbitz has always welcomed personal use of its website; however, we must retain reasonable control over the website to prevent commercial misuses of the site.
First of all, we need to use terms with a common understanding. "Deep Links" or "Deep Linking" as used in Orbitz' Terms of Service specifically means by-passing the Orbitz interface (home page and search process) by linking directly to search results.
This is not new, and our concern is expressed as well in the current terms of service in a slightly different manner. Orbitz has numerous relationships with companies that use deep-links to its website for commercial purposes, and welcomes these links, where and when the appropriate permissions have been granted.
Orbitz has an obligation to its users to ensure the appropriate use of our website and its content, and must take reasonable steps to avoid customer confusion related to the source of the information provided to its users. Additionally, it is necessary to prevent uses that interfere with the proper working of the site, or uses that impose an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure.
There is nothing in the Orbitz' new Privacy Policy or Terms and Conditions which precludes an individual or commercial enterprise from linking to our website home page, or from linking to a specific page for informational purposes, or from e-mailing an purchased or potential itinerary to another person for informational purposes. In fact, some of these functions are available today on the website.
Thank you for your interest in using Orbitz. We appreciate your business, and we look forward to assisting you with your travel plans in the near future.
Sincerely,
(name removed) Orbitz Customer Relations Chicago, IL
Funny thing about this nicely worded reply is, NOWHERE and I MEAN NOWHERE on either their old or new terms of conditions, does Orbitz use the phrase deep-linking or any derivitive of it. So how can they expect us to use terms of common understanding when they don't even use the terms?
I'm not very familiar with PGP, never having reason to use it, but aren't PGP private keys a short memorable sequence which the recepient uses to decode a message encoded with his public key?
So if I'm subpoenaed couldn't I just say 'I forgot the private key because of all the stress this subpoena placed me under'
Now all they have is an encrypted message that can never be decrypted.
Sirs,
I refer to the text of your Terms and Conditions as attached below.
My question to you is how do you intend to enforce these conditions since,
1. To read them someone must go to your site and find them.
2. You cannot dictate what any internet user puts on their own website, this is called the right to free speech and is embodied in almost every constitution in the world, even if some countries seem determined to undermine it with legislation.
and
3. A simple search on Google using the words Orbitz and Terms comes up with deep links to your own site. Do you now intend to ask google to remove all those links therefore rendering your website unreachable by the majority of internet users.
Would it not be simpler for your web administrator to implement code changes to restrict access to only your home page based on the
referrer value rather then trying a legalise approach which has no
possibility of succeeding and will in fact only mean that you will
lose customers.
I look forward to hearing your reply.
(Your name here)
Relavent T&C section :
Inbound Links
We welcome links from a third party site to the home page of our
Site, through a plain text link, provided that (a) you give Orbitz
prior written notice of such link by contacting Orbitz Customer
Service, to request Orbitz's permission to establish the link; (b) you
discontinue providing a link to our Site if so requested by Orbitz;
(c) you do not imply in any fashion that Orbitz is endorsing any of
your products or service or is affiliated with you, (d) you do not
present Orbitz in a false light, or provide misleading or false
information about Orbitz, or its Site or Services, (e) you do not
remove or obscure the copyright notices, or other notices on this
Site; (f) you do not use any Mark of Orbitz; and (g) you do not
replicate, frame or mirror the content of the Site.
We reserve the right to require you to remove links to the Site,
in our sole discretion.
Linking to any page of the Site other than to the homepage is
strictly prohibited in the absence of a separate linking agreement
with Orbitz.
I would count myself among the responsible PC users but I have a query.
Say I'm using XP and a firewall.
I open up IE and my firewall asks me do I want to give this program access.
I say Yes.
Have I just negated the value of my firewall since I have no given access to the program with the most holes in it?
Slashdot Mirror
(Fourteen hours later).....
Hey wait a minute, that was an insult!!!!
Dear (name removed),
Thank you for your recent correspondence to Orbitz with regards to our new Terms and Conditions. Orbitz has always welcomed personal use of its website; however, we must retain reasonable control over the website to prevent commercial misuses of the site.
First of all, we need to use terms with a common understanding. "Deep Links" or "Deep Linking" as used in Orbitz' Terms of Service specifically means by-passing the Orbitz interface (home page and search process) by linking directly to search results.
This is not new, and our concern is expressed as well in the current terms of service in a slightly different manner. Orbitz has numerous relationships with companies that use deep-links to its website for commercial purposes, and welcomes these links, where and when the appropriate permissions have been granted.
Orbitz has an obligation to its users to ensure the appropriate use of our website and its content, and must take reasonable steps to avoid customer confusion related to the source of the information provided to its users. Additionally, it is necessary to prevent uses that interfere with the proper working of the site, or uses that impose an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure.
There is nothing in the Orbitz' new Privacy Policy or Terms and Conditions which precludes an individual or commercial enterprise from linking to our website home page, or from linking to a specific page for informational purposes, or from e-mailing an purchased or potential itinerary to another person for informational purposes. In fact, some of these functions are available today on the website.
Thank you for your interest in using Orbitz. We appreciate your business, and we look forward to assisting you with your travel plans in the near future.
Sincerely,
(name removed)
Orbitz Customer Relations
Chicago, IL
Funny thing about this nicely worded reply is, NOWHERE and I MEAN NOWHERE on either their old or new terms of conditions, does Orbitz use the phrase deep-linking or any derivitive of it. So how can they expect us to use terms of common understanding when they don't even use the terms?
I'm not very familiar with PGP, never having reason to use it, but aren't PGP private keys a short memorable sequence which the recepient uses to decode a message encoded with his public key?
So if I'm subpoenaed couldn't I just say 'I forgot the private key because of all the stress this subpoena placed me under'
Now all they have is an encrypted message that can never be decrypted.
Alternatively send this to corpcom@orbitz.com
Sirs,
I refer to the text of your Terms and Conditions as attached below.
My question to you is how do you intend to enforce these conditions since,
1. To read them someone must go to your site and find them.
2. You cannot dictate what any internet user puts on their own website, this is called the right to free speech and is embodied in almost every constitution in the world, even if some countries seem determined to undermine it with legislation.
and
3. A simple search on Google using the words Orbitz and Terms comes up with deep links to your own site. Do you now intend to ask google to remove all those links therefore rendering your website unreachable by the majority of internet users.
Would it not be simpler for your web administrator to implement code changes to restrict access to only your home page based on the referrer value rather then trying a legalise approach which has no possibility of succeeding and will in fact only mean that you will lose customers.
I look forward to hearing your reply.
(Your name here)
Relavent T&C section :
Inbound Links
We welcome links from a third party site to the home page of our Site, through a plain text link, provided that (a) you give Orbitz prior written notice of such link by contacting Orbitz Customer Service, to request Orbitz's permission to establish the link; (b) you discontinue providing a link to our Site if so requested by Orbitz; (c) you do not imply in any fashion that Orbitz is endorsing any of your products or service or is affiliated with you, (d) you do not present Orbitz in a false light, or provide misleading or false information about Orbitz, or its Site or Services, (e) you do not remove or obscure the copyright notices, or other notices on this Site; (f) you do not use any Mark of Orbitz; and (g) you do not replicate, frame or mirror the content of the Site. We reserve the right to require you to remove links to the Site, in our sole discretion. Linking to any page of the Site other than to the homepage is strictly prohibited in the absence of a separate linking agreement with Orbitz.
I would count myself among the responsible PC users but I have a query. Say I'm using XP and a firewall. I open up IE and my firewall asks me do I want to give this program access. I say Yes. Have I just negated the value of my firewall since I have no given access to the program with the most holes in it?