Linking to URLs on the web (was Useful Training pages...)

[Jon Knight]

On Thu, 18 Apr 1996, Melinda Brown wrote:
> I think it's different in that the number of people who cite an author 
> has little impact on the author's ability to conduct his/her daily 
> business, while the number of people who link to a site can have a great 
> impact on the server it resides upon.

I've had a URL for one of the documents I maintain (the Multicast
Transport Protocols page at
<URL:http://hill.lut.ac.uk/DS-Archive/MTP.html>) appear in loads of other
peoples multicast resource lists, included in a sidebar in Byte and appear
on a CD-ROM of web links.  All this and not one person asked me if they
could use the URL.  Does this worry me?  No, because if I hadn't wanted
the world to be able to pickup the URL and pass it around I would have
hidden it away and placed access restrictions on the page.  The whole
point of creating the page and making it publicly available in the first
place was to help spread information around and so I'm dead chuffed that
so many people have found it sufficiently useful that they have used the
URL in their own material.  In fact I'd be a pissed off if everytime
somebody wanted to link to one of the many pages I look after they felt
obliged to contact me to ask my permission (I've better things to do with
my life than give out permissions to use my URL). 

To my mind a URL is just a locator, just like a telephone number.  We
already know that you can't copyright a telephone number (the telcos have
tried that one and failed in the past - I'm no lawyer but ISTR that the
reason was that there was insufficient intellectual effort gone into
creating the number itself), so why should a URL be any different?  If I
can use a URL (with any access restrictions) then I have no problem with
slapping it into a hyperlink in my documents if appropriate.  Thats just
how the web works.

Tatty bye,

Jim'll

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *