[WEB4LIB] RE: permission to link to websites? -Reply

[Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org]

I doubt that it's a matter of legality--or if it is, it's certainly
unsettled. There's some indication that a site can reasonably object to:
(a) "deep linking" (to pages deep within a site that would otherwise be
prefaced with general information about the site), and particularly to:
(b) framed deep linking that seems to make the linked content actually part
of the site bearing the link
The latter is, if done correctly, a form of content hijacking/theft, when
done in commercial contexts.

And, to be sure, there are lots of cases where linking is inappropriate
(and would generally fail)--for example, attempts to link to search results
within for-fee databases, I say as the manager of the interface for one set
of such databases...

For most home pages and self-contained Web sites, on the other hand, "fair"
linking (where frames don't attempt to hijack the content), is something
most of us site owners (my personal site, in this case) would applaud.
After all, that's how Google raises your Web site's rankings: based on the
number of sites that link to it, weighted by the number of sites that link
to those sites.