RE: Potential wild-card issue outside W3C: legality of deep linking

+1

It is utterly incomprehensible that it could even require clarification
like this.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]
> Sent: Friday, July 05, 2002 10:29 AM
> To: WWW TAG
> 
> 
> Saw it in slashdot:
> http://slashdot.org/articles/02/07/05/1431249.shtml?tid=95 - A Danish
> court has ruled that deep linking is illegal.  This is obviously
> architecturally profoundly broken, and furthermore, HTTP provides in
the
> "referer" field a mechanism to implement a policy to prevent this
> happening if somebody for reasons that seem good to them wants to do
it.
> 
> I'm wondering if a statement from the W3C Technical Architecture Group
> might prove useful input to the debate that is clearly already under
way
> in the real world outside, something along the lines of
> 
>   The architecture of the World Wide Web does not support the notion
of a
>   "home page" or a "gateway page", and any effort in law to pretend
>   otherwise is therefore bad policy.  The publication of a Uniform
>   Resource Identifier is, in the architecture of the Web, a statement
>   that a resource is available for retrieval.  The technical protocols
>   which are used for Web interaction provide a variety of means for
site
>   operators to control access, including password protection and the
>   requirement that users take a particular route to a page.  It would
be
>   appropriate to bring the law to bear against those who violate these
>   protocols.  It is not appropriate to use it in the case where
>   information consumers are using the Web according to its published
>   rules of operation.

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 16:06:38 UTC