Skip to main content
On Wired, of interesting to weblogging:



Site Barks About Deep Link



"Deep links" point to specific content within a site, allowing readers to bypass the site's front page. Instead of linking to a specific article within The Dallas Morning News's site, Belo wants Adelman to only link to the site's main page.
The short version is that an issue that was supposedly settled a year or two ago has come back to life. The Dallas Morning News is asserting that barkingdog.org can only link to the paper's website "front page," and not to specific articles within the website. They claim that to do so is a potential violation of copyright.



Obviously this can have a serious impact on blogs, since a lot of them (such as here) quote from and link to articles all the time. You, gentle reader, would have to find your own way through a site's maze to an article that I might refer to, if The Dallas News has its way.



I'm still mystified how this would violate copyright. Such links direct people to the site. There is no theft, just--in a manner of speaking--an index to a specific article or item. The real lose is ad revenue, of course, since a lot of the complaining sites generate hit numbers off their front page. So, jumping to mid-site might not get counted as a hit, and thus there's no proof of readership with which to support ad rates. Something Belo, owner of The Dallas News, acknowledges with...



Belo says that those links ... more importantly, "allows the viewer to avoid the advertising, etc., on the homepage (which places our client in a bad position with respect to its advertisers, etc.)."
Well, bummer. Maybe they need a new accounting scheme? Or just avoid "permanent" links, so that a link that works one day for a story doesn't work the next. Or just flat out block access to archives. Etc. Seems there are other answers than saying--in essence--"How dare you link to my site without my permission!"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not the Hero We Deserve, But the Hero We Need

The Dark Knight is the best film I’ve seen in years. Not just the best “superhero” film, but the best film of any type. It’s not perfect, not quite a masterpiece, but it’s flaws are, to me, tiny and overwhelmed by the time the film ends. While relatively bloodless, it is consistently brutal, not just in what it depicts but in the themes that drive it. TDK is a film for adults, please leave the kids at home. Let’s deal with those “flaws” first, the largest being the character Rachel Dawes . In Batman Begins , I blamed Katie Holmes . Her acting was weak, to say the least, which is regrettable in that who she is and what she says and does are important to the film. Critics agreed and either for that or other reasons, Katie was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal , who is a better actress. Yet here she’s weak, real weak. Maybe it’s the character, not the actress, which is frustrating because Rachel is a pivotal character. The film,...
1 comment
Read more

DVD: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Awful. The film is an environmentalist wacko wet dream. No one else could like this thing. I’m trying to think of something positive and all I can come up with is how positively awful it is. The original The Day the Earth Stood Still is a science fiction masterpiece. In it, Klaatu comes to Earth with a simple message: Do what you want among yourselves and on your planet. But if you attempt to export your violent way to the stars, Gort and his friends will hit you with so many lefts you’ll beg for a right. (Gort being the cosmic version of Chuck Norris, you see.) The ultimate warning was that we needed to change our violent ways if we expected to be accepted among the stars. In this remake, the aliens are environmental busy-bodies who have bought into the entire notion that we puny little humans are capable of destroying the planet. Therefore, we must be eliminated so that the planet, for God knows what reason, can try again. To count the ways in which this film makes no sense ...
1 comment
Read more

I (Briefly) Try a Mac

 I Bought a Mac. My first computer was an Atari 800, fully loaded with 48k of RAM. And I mean the original, beige model, not its low-slung, fancy successor. My friend went for an Apple IIe, which cost a relative fortune. Eventually, I’d step up to an Atari 1040ST, while he’d get a IIgs. And even more eventually, we both ended up with IBM PC compatibles. MSDOS was my friend, Unix an ally. It was with great reluctance that I transition from a command-line interface (CLI) to a Graphic User Interface (GUI), always on a PC platform and never a Mac. I never bought into the hype and never experienced all the horrid things that allegedly befell anyone using a PC. For me, they just worked. Yet here I am, these many decades later, typing this on a brand-new MacBook Air M4. How things change... Initially, there was little regret but a mounting list of frustrations. Adjusting to the keyboard isn’t too hard, it’s just a matter of experimentation. Learning how to scale the display wasn’t awful, ...
Post a Comment
Read more