This is an edited version of my response to a similar question in lis-
webpeople, so apologies to anyone who gets a sense of deja-vu.
First off, let me emphasise that I am not a lawyer, and I am
expressing a personal view (just in case!).
AFAIK, in the absence of any specific legislation you can link to
whatever you like on the web.
I suspect that some corporate lawyer types would *like* there to be
restrictions, but (fortunately, IMHO) the web is not a collection of
discrete advertising sites with only one approved mode of entry into
each. Tough for them.
Sensible people and organisations *welcome* links to their content,
whether it be to the site's home page or not, and ensure that every
page has adequate navigational links to allow people who come in from
the side (as it were) to get to the site's home page easily, also to
any copyright stuff, disclaimers, or terms and conditions. This is
the business of site designers, though - people who link to a site
aren't responsible for that site's poor design (eg lack of adequate
navigation, copyright info only on the home page etc). If their
revenue stream depends on hits counted on their home page alone, then
that's poor design on their part. Similarly if they haven't provided
navigation on all pages because you are only "supposed" to see some
of them from within a frameset.
The web is meant to be made up of links, which go *directly* to
meaningful information (that's the point of hypertext), not
necessarily the home page of a site, which may not be meaningful in
the context of the link.
There may be *practical* difficulties in linking to other pages if
the target site reorganises itself and breaks the links, hence the
availability of link checkers.
AFAIK, you don't need permission to link to anywhere with the
exception of embedded/embedding items (see below): if it is linkable-
to, you can link to it. This is how the web works: if you don't want
people to link to something, you either don't put it on the web in
the first place or implement some form of access control, eg
authentication etc.
Where you almost certainly do need to get permission (out of
politeness anyway, irrespective of any legal issues, which probably
do come into play here) is if you are including *parts* of some other
site's document (for example embedded items such as graphics) on your
own page, or if you are wrapping someone else's document in one of
your frames. Either practice effectively makes someone else's content
look like yours.
See Tim Berners-Lee's views on this (particularly the distinction
between linking and embedding) at:
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkLaw
... and the follow up piece on myths about linking. TBL being the man
who invented the web.
As part of the aforementioned discussion, Ian Winship provided this
link to a further discussion on this issue:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/website-info-mgt.html
- thread in February and March called "Avoiding copyright
infringement".
And David Little provided these:
http://www.paulpedley.com (source for the following links)
http://www.openly.com/link.openly/etiquette.html
http://www.nolo.com/encyclopedia/articles/articles/ilaw/linking.html
In purely practical terms, having read through the discussion cited
by Ian Winship, I would carry on linking as normal until someone
complains, and if they object to you having a link to them, or that
link not going via their home page, remove or edit it.
If the objection to "deep links" has no good practical reasoning*
behind it, then I'd be tempted to remove the link completely (if you
can live without it) so they eventually end up with a nice site with
linking which is so controlled that they have nobody connecting to it
:-)
Should keep their lawyers happy, though with no hits they'll be
wasting their time. Especially as they will have had to block search
engine crawlers to avoid sideways entry via searching so nobody will
be able to find them that way either!
HTH
John Whalley
* An example of "good practical reasoning" would be someone using a
redirector for their home page, so if the site moves links to
subpages will break. In other words, they are trying to make your
life easier by advising on how to avoid links breaking in the
future.
> Does anyone know what the current legal position is on deep-linking to
> websites? By deep-linking, I mean having a link on your own website to
> something like http://www.dfee.gov.uk/pns/newslist.cgi
> <http://www.dfee.gov.uk/pns/newslist.cgi> , rather than just
> http://www.dfee.gov.uk <http://www.dfee.gov.uk> . It seems to be something
> of a grey area with guidance & practice varying between organisations. Is
> it legal or not?
>
> Emma
> Telephone 020 7925 6556
--
* John Whalley, Crewe Site Library, Manchester Metropolitan University
* email: [log in to unmask]
* Phone: (+44) 161 247 5220 (UK)
* Usual disclaimer applies...........
