Sunday, August 25, 2002

Deep Controversy A site called Don't Link to Us! (if busy, try it's mirror site) lists sites that prohibit deep linking. It's a great idea, although a comprehensive listing of these sites would be very useful. The site highlights Law.com's confusing policy, in which I found this gem: Use of any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our Web pages or the content contained herein is strictly forbidden. As I read the above statement, Google is in violation -- it spiders the site and copies the site to it's cache. The Wayback Machine does, too. Will a lawsuit result? (No, I am not a lawyer.) The least that Law.com could do is put up a robots.txt file, but they don't. (Note to Law.com: There is a well-defined method for preventing your site from being spidered. Posting a brain-dead policy is not that method.) 12:24:52 AM    comment []