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Don't link or I'll sue! | page 1, 2
Web site operators who don't want anyone to link to them -- or who want to limit visitors to some preselected group -- always have the option of building a gate in front of their pages, an authentication routine that checks to make sure that the visitor is a registered user. But outside of sites that charge subscription fees for access, such schemes are rare on the Web, for good reason: From the early days of HotWired -- which originally required visitors to register for access -- to the present, Web sites have learned the hard way that users tend to go away when they hit any kind of barrier. And the Web business remains a numbers game, so why hobble yourself? The most successful companies online understand that the more people who link to you, the better. Amazon.com's associates program, which lets any Web site that points visitors to Amazon's bookstore collect a small slice of the sale, is the embodiment of this principle -- but you don't need to sign up with anyone or get permission to link "deep" to any page in Amazon's catalog you choose. Objectors to "deep linking," like Ticketmaster and Universal, want to have their Web businesses both ways: They put their services and content out on the public Web to attract users, but they also expect to be able to control every facet of how those users access their services and content. They want their pages to be openly available to individual visitors but not to other sites -- a division rendered nearly impossible by the very technical structure of the Web. Scott Rosenberg's column appears once a week in Technology Of course, what software can't do, maybe the courts can accomplish. Right now there is no legal precedent to establish either the "right to link" or, alternately, a Web site's right to prohibit links. Sooner or later, though, one of these disputes will wind up in court. I'd like to think that would be a good thing, and that the legal system would understand and honor the Web's essential openness, while leaving room for the law to crack down on truly parasitical behavior (like one site's "framing" another's content with its own ads). But it's just as likely that we'll end up with a decision that extends special privileges to some kinds of commercial Web sites and declares certain kinds of linking to be verboten. If that happens, the consequences could be grim. As it is, we've only barely scratched the surface of the new kinds of communication that the Web might enable. Linking today remains primitive; we need new elaborations of the Web's interface and underlying protocols that allow, for instance, links to contain more information -- so that they become less like unmarked doorways and more like well-mapped paths. But if we are headed for a climate in which every Web author needs to check with every link target before putting up a page, then forget such innovation; forget new services and search sites, forget the continued growth of Web use. Instead, consider the morass of confusion we will enter: If "deep linking" becomes regulated or illegal, who do the rules apply to? All Web sites or just "big commercial" Web sites? Who would draw that line? What about individual users -- is "deep bookmarking" to become a problem too? How about passing around a "deep link" on a mailing list? Let's pray for some deep sanity to prevail here, or we will find ourselves in deep, uh, trouble.
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