> Can anyone on this list tell me if this is true??? >> No one needs to get your permission to provide a link to your site. >> According to web caselaw the fact that you have provided a links to your >> data implies that you give permission for someone to link to it. We are >> not selling your data we are only providing an index to links on the web >> as explained in the previous paragraph. In fact the links provide more >> traffic to your site and therefore it is considered a benefit by the >> courts.> Well, that part is perfectly true. The whole point to the web is to allow things to be linked together. If you don't want something to be public knowledge, you shouldn't put it on a public web site. There are META headers you can insert into your html files to specify that you do not want your site indexed. But compliance is voluntary; an index site does not have to respect your request not to index your files. -- Tom Thatcher [email protected] <http://members.rpa.net/~thatcher> <http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=thatcher-th>

--=====================_333259013==_.ALT Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed At 10:31 PM 9/28/00 -0400, Tom Thatcher wrote: > > Can anyone on this list tell me if this is true??? > > >> No one needs to get your permission to provide a link to your site. > >> According to web caselaw the fact that you have provided a links to your > >> data implies that you give permission for someone to link to it. We are > >> not selling your data we are only providing an index to links on the web > >> as explained in the previous paragraph. In fact the links provide more > >> traffic to your site and therefore it is considered a benefit by the > >> courts.> > >Well, that part is perfectly true. The whole point to the web is to allow >things to be linked together. While it is true that the original purpose of the web was to allow things to be linked together, much of the web now exists to make money for someone. That means there are lawyers involved, and that means nothing is certain. Whether you can link to a site without that site's permission is a hotly debated issue. You can get a flavor for some of the arguments at <http://www.patents.com/weblaw.sht#lo> and at Brad Templeton's "Top 10 myths on copyright explained" site that has a separate page on "Linking Rights" <http://www.templetons.com/brad/linkright.html>. There have been several cases brought charging people with illegally linking to web sites, most often when the content of the linked web site is inserted in a frame on the second web site. See, for example, Ticketmaster Corp. v. Microsoft Corp. and Shetland Times Ltd. v. Dr. Jonathan Willis and Zetnews Ltd. and Washington Post v. TotalNews. As far as I know, these have all been settled out of court, and so there is no statement one way or the other as to the legality of the practice. There may be a chance that what these people are doing is illegal. The big question is whether you feel like finding a lawyer and suing them. That is the only way you will find out for sure. On a different matter, the original posting quoted the letter from the company stating that "Our indexing of the web falls under the fair use doctrine of copyright law." My guess as a non-lawyer is that this may not be true. To index your web page, they have to make a copy of it with their robot. Since you own the copyright on the page, you can control how and when people make a use of the material. If I were a judge evaluating the fair use factors, I would find in your favor on purpose, amount, and economic impact. I might only find for them on the nature of the material. The wild card in all of this is whether they are actually using your creative expression. If all they are taking are the facts you may have uncovered (birth, marriage, death, etc.) they may be ok. In short, if you registered your web pages and put a notice on them that people can copy them only for non-comm