I am sure my web builder has the information in the small print, but I am. . . well. . . just too damn lazy to read through everything.
I am building a home page and want to use a few links to other sites. Can I link to these sites without asking permission as long as I don’t actually copy and paste anything from their site onto mine?
Pardon me while I burst into flames.
Yes, you can. A judge recently ruled that you can link anything. I can dig up the case for you, if you want. But you can link whatever you want, as long as it isn’t a link to illegal material. So no links to illegal MP3 ftp sites, or anything like that.
Truth does not change because it is, or is not, beleived by a majority of the people.
-Giordano Bruno
Not quite. You can still link to the page with the mp3s and be legal, just not the mp3s themselves. And even if u link to the mp3s themselves you have a decent fight.
“no links to illegal MP3 ftp sites, or anything like that.”
You can link to anything you want but you can really piss people off if you link to their images or text so same shows on your site.
You can link the front page of any site you want, and no one will care. Chances are you’re doing them a favor.
What you can and can’t do is less of a legal issue for you, because chances are you’re not going to be running a multi-million dollar business. The server you’re on may have certain rules and restrictions that you have to abide byand if you don’t, they can get rid of your page.
Fly, the case you were talking about involves something called deep linkingnot linking their front page, but somewhere deep inside their page that you normally would have to wade through many other pages to get to. In the case you speak of, Tickets.com was linking to information deep withing Ticketmaster’s website.
Tickets.com can still do what they did, but the the practice itself isn’t quite legal across the board. His ruling wasn’t that all-encompassing. Read a NY Times article on the subject if you’re interested. I think the biggest point that they bring up is that they have still yet to determine if the terms of service that Ticketmaster has on their webpage is a legally binding contract if you continue to use the page.
There is another case, involving ebay and a “meta-auction” size, that could have a big impact on deep-linking. In this case, the other party has spiders automatically combing ebay’s site for auctions, and deep links. Ebay claims that they support deep links in general, but not when it’s “wholesale and systematic”, and directly subtracts from their business (the other auction site is using ebay’s auction info).
Bottom line for now is that it’s officially a gray area, but, like Kupek said, unless you’re doing it in competition with the company you’re linking to, you’re probably not going to be noticed. This is especially true if you don’t have spiders, or other automatic web-crawling programs constantly accessing other pages.
Arjuna34
Seems to be two areas here intermixing. 1. using links of images to display images on your own site [usually a no no without perimission]e.g. http://straightdope.com/image.jpg 2. talking about a hyperlink on your own site & giving that link [okay]e.g. http://straightdope.com
