Permission for Linking or Not?
by David Peralty on July 6th, 2006 
5 Comments
Shel Holtz has a great post about links and how deeplinking to articles and other types of files are still a bit of a legal question mark.
The article works on answering the question: “Do you need permission to link to somebody else’s content?”
My understanding is that, with some very narrow exceptions, any content that is freely accessible on the web is fair game for a link.
The question today, though, is whether the broad court findings on deep links apply to non-HTML content. Based on search engines’ ability to find Adobe Acrobat PDF files and the various search engines that scour images, audio, and video, it would be easy to assume that all publicly-accessible content is fair game for linking. As one court put it, if you don’t want people to link to it, don’t put it on the web
How about we ignore the legalities and ask the real question: “Is deep-linking directly to a non-HTML file (like a PDF) polite?”
I’ve always believed that if you’re going to link to something that’s non-HTML, you should link to the page on the destination site that links to it, not the direct file itself – if only because the file itself could change without your knowledge, but the site responsible for maintaining that file is likely going to update their own page to keep it accurate.
Is it illegal to link directly to it? I don’t think it should be, unless you can prove some kind of outrageous damages (like a few TB of extra bandwidth because some asshat hotlinked to something through their MySpace profile). The idea behind the internet is that it’s supposed to be a big shared resource. That’s why links exist in the first place – to point people to material elsewhere that may be of interest or help.
Illegal? I don’t think so. Impolite? Perhaps. Stupid from a future accuracy perspective? In most cases.
Great thought Chris.
Though many people online are not polite, which brings us back to needing a law to protect people, their files, and ideas.
Taking articles from article directories usually are allowed but permission is required if taking from websites.