Psss! – Hey, Dallas Morning News! – your clue is: redirect
May 1st, 2002Wired News reports that the Dallas Morning News has a daft, impossible to enforce Terms of Service page forbidding deep linking on their site. You MUST link only to their main page, they say, as they contend that by using their site you have entered into a legal agreement to be bound by these terms that are behind an unobtrusive link at the bottom of their page that you’re not forced to view.
Of course, they do nothing at all to enforce this via the web server. Anybody with even the remotest clue of running a web server could enforce single-point entry. But NOOOO, they’d rather fritter away their lives in petty litigation about linking than simply stop it from being possible.
It makes you wonder whether their web services people must be in collusion with the guys they get to do their cease and desist letters.
Brent, you’ve just violated their terms of service by linking directly to their terms of service.
I’ll just make sure I never link to any of their pages or homepage ever. All bloggers should do this.
Funniest of all, they’ve got an “e-mail this page to a friend” feature on every article on the site 😉 So much for driving traffic in through the front page…
That is classic Simon!!
Re: Not linking them.
It would be a lot more fun to deep link them everyday of the week