Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Why you don't need lawyers to block links -- and hot reactions to the Chris Nolan story.
Aug 18, 1999 | In this week's column, we play cleanup and catchup on two issues I've written about recently: the "deep linking" controversy and newsroom ethics in the Chris Nolan affair.
Deeper into deep links
In last week's "Don't Link or I'll Sue!" I expressed mystification and consternation at the efforts of some companies online, notably Ticketmaster and Universal, to stop other Web sites from "deep linking" to them -- that is, pointing to pages deep within their Web directories rather than to their home pages. While most Web sites crave links and depend on them to get the word out and garner new traffic, these companies have instead sicced their lawyers on the linkers.
My column implied that there were only limited technical methods a site could use to restrict access to visitors following unwanted "deep links." Silly me: My in box immediately overflowed with messages enumerating a vast array of methods that rely on programming logic rather than lawsuits.
Sites can have their Web servers check the "referrer" headers on incoming visitors and screen out certain domains entirely. They can use "cookies" to make sure that visitors to "deep pages" have first checked in, as it were, at the site's home page. They can build a "page wrapper" into their site design that reroutes traffic in various ways.
Dave Winer has suggested extending the convention of the "robots.txt" file -- a set of instructions some sites post telling visiting spiders (automated programs cataloging pages for search engines) where they can and can't crawl -- to deep linking: Sites would post files that declare what kinds of links they allow or disallow, and other sites would respect those wishes by checking this file.
Ticketmaster is a big company that has built a complex e-commerce site; its engineers doubtless know all about the technical possibilities here. Indeed, during the height of its 1997 spat with Microsoft Sidewalk, the Ticketmaster site redirected all Sidewalk visitors to a crudely written message that basically said, "Go through our home page or go home!" I'm guessing (and worrying) that its repeated resort to the law in these conflicts means that Ticketmaster wants to push this issue until it establishes a clear legal precedent.
That could be bad news for everyone. The more that linking becomes entangled with the law, the more we'll find the Web choked and stunted. Still, the closer you look at this issue the more nuances and exceptions emerge.
There are powerful arguments by analogy to other media, like this one Ron Ralston sent me, likening links to providing citations of printed material: "If I find an interesting article in the New York Times and I want to tell you about it, am I allowed to tell you that it's in the upper right hand corner of Page 3 of the Opinion section? Or am I allowed to tell you only that it's in the Times? Does giving you the location of the interesting article subvert some implied requirement that you 'eyeball' all of the ads between the front page and it? Does giving you the location somehow damage the advertiser and/or the Times? Does the Times have the right to forbid me telling you where the article is? Such ideas are preposterous when applied to printed media, but lawyers would have us think they make perfect sense when applied to the Web."
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