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Bill Gates, Man United and 20 other sites that ban linking to them
- malcolmcoles 3y agoFrom 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1178072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1178072 Royal Mail still at it 14 years later
- firemelt 3y agois it forced? how did they could do it?
- netsharc 3y agoIn theory they could check the referer and redirect requests containing the referer to the front page. Or to a page that says "Violation detected". Or to a picture of testicles like a particular non-fan of Hacker News does when his site sees this site in the referer URL.
- lolc 3y agoThat's some weird-ass disconnect from reality. Is that clause some kind of meme the control freak legal departments copy from each other without good reason? Or is there an actual reason I could understand?
- scotty79 3y agoHigh level of delusion about ownership of other people and their actions.
- keiferski 3y agoMaybe I’m misremembering, but I feel like this used to be a widespread thing one did circa 2000-2005 (before Web 2.0). I remember emailing a handful of sites and asking them if I could link to their content, and this being a normal request.
- t0mas88 3y agoI think the typical email about links from around that time was for SEO optimization. They would request that you link to their site from a high ranking domain in exchange for a link from them back to you.
- keiferski 3y agoNo, that’s a different thing and it still happens today. I remember it being considered polite to ask people before placing a permanent link on your website. (Which was different from posting it on a forum.)
- cvalka 3y agoWhy would you email them for their permission? Are you nuts?
- cl42 3y ago+1 People disagreeing with your or shocked by you might not remember (or maybe are too young?) the Internet of the 1990s. Search engines sucked, directories were the thing, and putting your site in a directory or linking to a website was, sociologically + relatively speaking, a pretty big deal. Back then, there was no expectation that a website was publicly available to everyone, even though it was accessible if you knew the URL. Sort of like today people don't share their home addresses or photos of their living rooms unless there's a good reason to do so. EDIT: a better example in relation to today might be Tor addresses or dark web URLs.
- marklar423 3y agoSeveral of the examples reference "deep linking", for example "While we welcome all normal links to our sites we regard 'deep linking' as an infringement of our copyright." - I wonder what that could mean. Anything besides the home page?
- whaleofatw2022 3y agoIt can be a little wishy washy. stuff like /about or /contact -might- not be considered a deep link depending on the opinion of whomever is running the site.
- slyall 3y agoProbably so if they accidentally upload a confidential document they can claim that anybody who downloaded it (or shared the URLS) violated their T&Cs
- austinjp 3y agoTypically it's about media and means e.g. embedding media from their site into yours, or linking directly to that media. If you link directly to an image, say, the user won't see the target website's content, which they might object to.
- seanhunter 3y agoThe lawyer writing that knows that it doesn't matter very much whether the copyright holder regards something as infringement, it matters what courts think, and to the extent that these theories have been tested in court, they have generally failed[1]. You might as well say that you regard "deep linking" as treason punishable by death. They're just trying to frighten people. [1] eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com....
- leosanchez 3y agoNever expected Man Utd to feature in HN :p
- quink 3y agoIt’s happened before: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=manchester+united https://hn.algolia.com/?q=manchester+united