Sorry to bring this subject up again...
What policies do institutions have in place to guard against possible
copyright actions arising from links being made from framed html pages on
your web sites?
Here at Sheffield Hallam we discourage the use of frames in our WWW
provision, as I'm sure many of you do. We have implemented a VLE which uses
frames throughout though (Blackboard) and this is widely used here. There
is a concern that links from the VLE pages to external sites could be
construed as passing off the external site's content as our own and risk a
copyright legal action.
I realise the law is unclear on this topic still. Has any institution been
asked to remove any such links or been required to sign any agreement by a
commercial company limiting their use? We are reaching an impass here as we
cannot easily pop open new windows to break the frames from the VLE but are
obliged to respond to a large commercial organisation who have asked us not
to link to their site (deep or otherwise) from within a frame.
Any suggestions would be welcome.
Gary Martin
Academic IT Services Manager
Sheffield Hallam University
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