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By Brian Kelly - November 2002
The Web is all about linking. Authors of Web pages normally provide links to other Web resources. But should permission be sought before doing this? Can creating a link to a public document on the Web even be illegal? Brian Kelly considers the matter.
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When you create a public Web site you will normally include links to other Web sites. Similarly you will expect others to link to you. This rich linking which leads to a "web" of related resources is a fundamental aspect of the World Wide Web. The Web grew so rapidly because it was so easy to develop HTML pages and to include links.
Despite the widespread culture of linking freely Web resources we are now seeing instances of organisations which require permission to be granted before links can be made to the organisation's Web site. Why is this happening? Should you seek permission before linking to a resource? Should you develop a linking policy for your own Web site and request that third parties seek permission before linking to your Web site? Should you even attempt to enforce such a policy?
The Web would never have succeeded in becoming such a successful global communications medium if permission to link to resources were needed. Users expect to be able to follow links between Web sites and page authors expect to create such links with the minimum of fuss.
Links to resources help to drive visitors to Web sites and without such links users would find it difficult to find resources and many Web sites would lose the traffic they require in order to fulfil their function. The business model for many Web sites is based on the numbers of visitors they receive. Indeed there are a number of companies which exist in order to generate traffic to Web sites by creating artificial links.
As well as providing hypertext linking another feature of the Web from its original conception was the use of URLs to identify a resource. The aim was to allow users to access a resource directly, in an application-independent way: the Web was designed to avoid the need to give users potentially complex or lengthy navigational routes to resources (e.g. Go to my home page. Then look at the table of contents on the right. Select the third link down. Follow this link. On the new page there are over five hundred further links. Find the one with the title The Answer To Life The Universe and Everything. This is the resource you are looking for.).
As documented by the Don't Link To Us Web site [1] an increasing number of Web sites appear to be implementing policies which require permission before links can be added or restrict the resources to which links can be made.
Several arguments have been made to justify this approach:
The term "deep linking" has been used to describe linking to resources which are located within a Web site, other than on the Web site entry point (or "home page" as an entry point is commonly referred to). In his Alertbox column in March 2002 Jakob Nielsen argued that "Deep Linking is Good Linking" [2].
Eric Hellman's LinkOpenly article provides examples of "Linking Custom and Etiquette" [3] which aimed to address some of the concerns over potential linking abuses, such as the need to ensure that links are labelled accurately; to provide text or visual cues to indicate where a user will be going; to avoid linking to content from another site in a frameset or linking to a graphical resource directly.
Deep linking is concerned with traditional HTML links to resources on a Web site. There are a number of approaches to linking which can be used which may not normally be considered to be "deep linking" but which should be considered as the policy issues are still relevant. These include:
As the Web develops richer forms of hyperlinking technologies are being developed. For example XLink and XPointer will provide a richer form of hyperlinking (e.g. links which are activated on user action or when the document is loaded, links which replace the current document, are embedded inline within the current document or are displayed in a new window) and the ability to process portions of a resource [4].
A lively debate is taking place on deep linking and related linking policy issues. Different communities have very different perspectives. Slashdot [5] is an online forum which is very popular with the software development community. Linking policies was the subject of a recent debate on Slashdot [6], following the establishment of the "Don't Link To Us!" Web site [7] which provides information on sites with restrictive link policies (and was reviewed in a CNET News.com article [8]). Predictably the debate on Slashdot was overwhelmingly against restrictive linking policies.
As may be expected the legal profession has a different view! An article on "Linking and Liability" [9] has reviewed a number of legal concerns with linking, including derivative works; plagiarism by passing off someone else's materials as one's own; defamation; trademark infringement and problems with frames. An ABCNews.com article on "Testing the Links" [10] reported on a court case brought in San Francisco in which "Les Kelly, a professional photographer, brought a case against the Arriba Corp., then-owners of Ditto.com, a visual search engine that catalogues photos from the Web. Kelly argued that by showing his work on its site, Ditto.com had violated his copyrights and damaged his ability to sell them over the Web". The court "found the 'in-line' linking style used by Ditto.com - in which a new browser window displayed each Kelly photo within the standard Ditto.com layout, and contained the same advertising as the Ditto.com site - was illegal because it could fool viewers into thinking they were still on the Ditto.com site."
Further information on Internet linking legal issues is available from the Linking Law section in Google [11]. One document worthy of note is "LinkLaw Revisited: Internet Linking Law At Five Years" [12].
The techies tell us one thing, the lawyers something else. How should we react, both as authors of Web resources which will contain links to others and owners of resources which we may wish to protect.
A defensive approach would be to have a linking policy which insisted that people wishing to link to you obtained permission first. However this has many disadvantages: people are unlikely to take notice of your request (unless you attempt to enforce that policy by configuring your Web server so that links from pages held on sites for which approval had not been obtained would be redirected to an alternative resource); you will have to provide resources to respond to people who do make a request; resources on your Web site will be more difficult to find (especially by search engines which rank resources based on the numbers of links, such as Google); traffic to your Web site will decrease; users will find it difficult to navigate to resources from your home page and you (and your organisation)will be criticised for going against the ethos of the Web and, for educational organisations, it will be argued that you are discouraging citation.
Should you seek permission before linking to another site? Common sense tells us that this is not a scaleable solution. Strictly permission is required before forwarding an email message. However, in practice, most email users will take a pragmatic view and will forward messages to other users or lists if they feel this is likely to cause no harm, but would seek permission if the email message was felt to be confidential.
The following suggestions are made which aim to provide a pragmatic solution on linking policies.
Cultivate Interactive has published a policy document [13] which covers our link policies, together with piolicies on the continuation of the Cultivate Interactive Web site once the funding has finished.
Of course it should be pointed out that IANAL - I am not a lawyer!
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus. He works for
UKOLN
which is based at the
University of Bath
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For citation purposes:
Kelly, B. "Can I Link To Your Site?", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/link-policies/>
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