If you don’t want to be linked, you shouldn’t be on the Web. What is it going to take for organizations to understand that? National Public Radio is the latest organization to attempt to dictate a linking policy for its website. After a few days, NPR appeared to back down by revising its linking policy to include restrictions limiting the use of “NPR content for inappropriate commercial purposes” or the suggestion “that NPR promotes or endorses any third party’s causes, ideas, Web sites, products or services.” But is this really an appropriate linking policy? Is any linking policy appropriate?
For a few days, NPR was flat refusing to allow anyone to link to its material without written permission: “linking to or framing any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.” In order to link to NPR material, you’d have to fill out a form that required name, email address, physical address, phone number, information about your site, whether or not the site is a commercial endeavor, the state in which your site is incorporated, how long the link would remain active, and the “proposed wording of the link and accompanying text.” Whew.
The NPR linking policy had been in place since last March, but no one noticed it—or if they did, no one paid much attention to it—until Cory Doctorow linked to the permission form. Presumably without permission. Doctorow, an author and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), called the NPR linking policy “brutally stupid” for following the lead of huge commercial corporations like KPMG—the very antithesis of NPR—in requiring a formal agreement to link to the site. A few days after his initial post, Doctorow deconstructed NPR’s claim that it was reconsidering its linking policy. A few days later, Doctorow deconstructed NPR’s latest (and current) linking policy, explaining why any linking policy is inappropriate.
To date, there has been only one court case, Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com, involving website linking policies. In that case, the linking policies were struck down. In that case, U.S. District Judge Harry Hupp made his ruling sufficiently clear: “Hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library’s card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.”
The Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com ruling notwithstanding, clueless web publishers—including the Dallas Morning News, the Danish Newspaper Publishers’ Association, and Rodale Press—continue to try to use legal arguments to enforce linking policies. Specifically, they are concerned with “deep linking,” the process by which a website links to an interior or print-friendly page, bypassing the site’s front-page advertising.
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