You do not need permission to link to any website in the world. Nobody in the world can say, "That's not right; you didn't ask for my permission to put up a link to my site."
Yet a lot of people labor under this misimpression.
What's the best article online to send to people to explain this?
RE: Permission to link
Mr. Muskrat on 2005-02-25T21:23:24
Linking Rights is a great article on the subject and links to other sources of information such as Bechtold: The Link Controversy Page and two copyright pages.
Hmmm
zatoichi on 2005-02-26T01:40:43
I thought there was a court case in the news recently where linking (deep linking?) was found to be illegal. I could be wrong, I sometimes am. :-)
I did a google search and found several cases where courts upheld that deep linking was illegal.
I have not done any serious investigation though.
linking
da on 2005-03-01T00:15:54
I know you're not arguing that asking permission is wrong, but I think it's worth pointing out the other side of the coin: I consider it common courtesy to tell somebody you are linking to them. So part of the argument for asking permission is valid: it's polite to do so.
As with many other politenesses, excuses can be made that it takes time, won't necessarily help you in return, and most people don't bother. Sorry, but they're merely excuses for the lazy.
Not only do authors appreciate hearing their materials are being used, but I've gotten lots of useful suggestions from authors who I told "unless you mind, I'm going to link to your page." (such as "the page has an anchor tag for the section you're referring to" or "there's another good source at
...").
