| Date: | January 20, 2005 / year-entry #19 |
| Tags: | other |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050120-00/?p=36643 |
| Comments: | 47 |
| Summary: | Maybe they don't want people to find them. The copyright notice for the web site of Hutchison Whampoa Limited states, Copyright Hutchison Whampoa Limited. 2003. All rights reserved. No person, whether an individual or a body corporate, shall create or establish a hyperlink to the HWL Corporate Website by hypertext reference or imaging without the... |
Maybe they don't want people to find them. The copyright notice for the web site of Hutchison Whampoa Limited states,
I can't create a hyperlink so you'll have to find it yourself. This isn't an issue of deep linking; they are banning even links to their home page. |
Comments (47)
Comments are closed. |
I’d like to see them enforce that.
Heh. They don’t even want people to talk about them online! That sounds like negative publicity…
Hah.
The police force in Finland has banned by law the act of making hyperlinks to its website, http://www.poliisi.fi (I hope your blog does not create hyperlinks automatically)
But I don’t think it applies outside of Finland (how could Finnish laws apply in USA), so I’m good posting the link here. ;P
Are they suing Google, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, MSN Search… for having their link(s) in their databases? Did they exclude their robots? Did they explicitly grant the permission they are talking about to these companies? Now, if I had to link to Hutchinson Whampoa (can we say the name without being sued? but why, oh why, would I link to such a company), I think that I would finally have a use for the infamous rel = "nofollow" tag.
well, google has many links to that web site……
Clue to Hutchison Whampoa and the Finnish police:
If you don’t want to be linked to get off the public internet and move over to your own little private BBS where no one will trouble you.
Well, Google better be the first on their lawsuit list then…
Maybe google has a "written permission"?
Don’t Link To Us – http://www.dontlink.com/ – used to list sites that had policies like that. Alas it’s been a couple of years since it was updated.
If the Finnish do not permit linking to their police’s website, their website does a very poor job of telling you this (at least in English).
I could only find the following text:
In accordance with the Copyright Act (404/1961) as amended, the Finnish Police or other information producers mentioned in the document hold the copyright on the material published on this website. It is advised that those who wish to make use of the copyright material should contact the Information Unit of the Ministry of the Interior’s Police Department by e-mail at info@krp.poliisi.fi.
Perhaps their laws have been recently changed?
How about this?
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hutchison+Whampoa+Limited
Anyone know how to modify that google url so that it does an "I feel lucky" ?
Found it:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hutchison+Whampoa+Limited &btnI
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hutchison+Whampoa+Limited &btnI
Well anyway – you put &btnI on the end of the URL
I wish someone wrote ‘Technology for Lawyers’ series just like Eric Sink wrote ‘Marketing for Geeks’ series.
JD
Sometimes people smoke very suspicios stuff :-)
They say "no person" but make no mention of automated web crawlers. ;-) I wonder if they know about the Robots Exclusion Protocol: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html
Regarding the Google lawsuit, I’m not sure how anyone can make a legal case against a web search company for indexing their site when they didn’t make an effort to figure out how to prevent search engines from indexing them.
Even though the Ticketmaster vs. Tickets.com case was about deep linking, there were some decisions made regarding hyperlinks and web site terms of use:
"Further, hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act (whatever it may do for other claims) since no copying is involved. The customer is automatically transferred to the particular genuine web page of the original author. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library’s card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently."
So they would lose a case based on copyright infringement. The court also ruled that since Ticketmaster’s terms and conditions weren’t required to be read (ie, "Click to indicate your agreement" and then proceed to web site), they weren’t legally binding:
"It cannot be said that merely putting the terms and conditions in this fashion necessarily creates a contract with anyone using the web site."
My interpretation (I’m not a lawyer, get your own legal advice, etc.) is that if this were handled in US courts, HW Ltd. would lose.
Find out all this and more:
http://www.gigalaw.com/library/ticketmaster-tickets-2000-03-27.html
A list of people who link to HW:
<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.hutchison-whampoa.com">http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.hutchison-whampoa.com</a>
A list of people who link to HW (fixed link):
http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.hutchison-whampoa.com
Pace (in the UK) do exactly the same thing.
"If you wish to link to and/or frame any content of this website you are required to seek Pace’s written permission prior to doing so. Requests to link or frame the contents of our site should be made to Pace’s Web Master"
I’ve linked them from my web site, added a notice saying the whole point of the link is to show how stupid their policy is, and sent them an email challenging them to sue me.
"…By placing Your Site on the Web, You agree to allow free linking to any publicly-accessible page on Your Site, regardless of any statements to the contrary on Your Site…"
Ah, if only.
They could easily enforce it. All they need to do is check the HTTP_REFERER and bounce the user if its from an outside site.
By the way, why didn’t TicketMaster do that to Tickets.Com? I know it isn’t a perfect solution, but it is easier than a lawsuit.
But then, how did they get on Google in the first place, if no one was allowed to link to them? If there’s no links to the site, then the googlebot won’t crawl the site, since it can’t get to it. Unless of course, they explicitly add their site to google’s index, which would somewhat defeat the purpose of their notice…
And they haven’t even thought about their PageRank! With no links, how could they be number 1 in a search!?
Interesting enough, the disclaimer about linking is not on their Disclaimer link but on their Copyright link.
Interesting side note, one of the basic tenets of web site navigation of clicking on the top logo to return to the home page of the site results in a javascript warning "downloading of this image is not allowed". Paranoia overcomes usability though this high-end protection scheme is easily overcome if anyone would want a copy of their logo; hell, it comes up in Google Images.
Interesting to note the ‘high-end protection scheme’ on the logo is ONLY on the logo, too.
if(document.images) {
document.images.logo.onmousedown = block;
}
Reminds me of some on-line PDFs that disallow "Save as…". Easy enough to circumvent – just pull it out of the browser cache.
Of course, it could all just be a cunning ploy to gain more links – after all, how many people have now just linked to them out of contrariness? :-)
Regarding the ‘protection’, I’m always amazed people still try that. Turn off Javascript, and what do you know, you can save the images. Heck, even if you just make Javascript unable to disable context menus, you can still save them. It’s simple enough that you’d think people would figure it out.
The javascript doesn’t work in Firefox with a right-click, only a left-click o_O
Oh, and this from their disclaimer page:
HWL Corporate Website — Applicable Laws
All matters relating to your access to, and use of information in this website shall be governed by the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China ("Hong Kong").
So if you link to them Hong Kong will sue you.
Ooh, just look at all these scofflaws:
<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.hutchison-whampoa.com">http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.hutchison-whampoa.com</a>
Wait. Downloading isn’t allowed?
That means I shouldn’t have been able to SEE THE LOGO IN THE FIRST PLACE!
They claim to be innovative and understand technology…heh. It’s obvious they don’t.
Contrary to what someone claimed above, linking to the web site of the Finnish Police is NOT prohibited by law. However, the police force did attempt to ban linking at one point but was refuted by legal experts, including the Ombudsman of Justice of the Finnish Parliament – whose interpretations of legal issues, though not conclusive, are considered quite authoritative in Finland.
See the following web site for more information (in Finnish only):
http://www.effi.org/sananvapaus/linkit.html
The next time somebody makes a claim regarding the laws of Finland, I would very much prefer that they provide some references such as a link (!) to the official FINLEX database that includes the full text of all Finnish laws and statutes. (It should be noted that the legal status of FINLEX with regard to copyright is somewhat unclear. The reason for that is too complex to explain here.)
Here is a sample link to FINLEX:
http://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/1734/17340004000
That’s the Finnish Code of Judicial Procedure, enacted in 1734 and still in force (though heavily updated over the years). For anyone who’s wondering, they don’t have the full text of all laws and statutes from the 18th Century available on the web, only those laws that remain at least partially in force.
Whenever I hear of H-W , I think of "the Company" from the Alien movies, Weyland-Yutani.
Hm, Hutchison Whampoa doesn’t seem to have a /robots.txt file. This makes almost no sense. Why would you go to all the bother to create a Web site, and then NOT want traffic driven to the site?
I wonder if I should tempt fate and create a link to them…
"and then click both mouse buttons pretty much at the same time (right a fraction earlier) on the button … the context menu will then pop-up on what you were after. "
No that only works in some cases. If they captured the oncontextmenu event you are out of luck and need to find the source via the view source menu (possibly hunting through frame references) or disabling JS.
"by hypertext reference or imaging"
Doesn’t this seem to suggest that a non-image non-hypertext reference is ok?
So I could create a textfile which contained the URL and link to that.
What about making it a "text-only" flash button?
Is Javascript out of the question?
Their note is about as inane as telling people on the street to not look at you. Sorry, the internet is about as public as real life when it comes to linking. Linking good. (fire bad)
MEX Blog » Hutchison Whampoa Limited mag keine Links
Downloading their logo: With many browsers, such as Avant Browser, if you hover over the logo image for a few seconds, a small menu pops up with various options including Save, so it’s not hard to download their less-than-impressive logo. (Avant is not a whole browser in itself, but rather a tabbed-browser overlay that uses IE for much of what it does.)
You cannot use the HTTP_REFERER for several reasons. It can be spoofed, it can be turned off, and, worse, it can be completely wrong.
In some "browsers", if you reuse a window and type in a URL, it sends the URL of the page you were on as the referrer — even though that’s blatantly false (and a security risk).
They can’t even google for people who link to them. Consider the output of tinyurl: http://tinyurl.com/5ae26 a link to them might not even look like one.
But is it a link to them? Really, I just created a link to tinyurl. It’s <em>those</em> guys who linked to HWL.
S’ok, I cannot read their copyright notice. Whatever tool it is that autocreates those MM_ JavaScript functions does not create JS that Opera understands. Poor losers. Guess that means their copyright does not apply to me, as I cannot read it.