[LINK] permission required to link?

[Roger Clarke]

Danny Yee <danny@www.caa.org.au>:
>I have a friend who is building a website but faces management
>insistence that they obtain permission for every link!!  Can someone
>point me at a good resource (preferably an Australian one, though I
>checked Roger's site already and couldn't find anything) that explains
>that this isn't necessary?

Sorry, but I haven't done the hard yards to find out whether there 
are good authorities.

Below is my standard response (actually it's from a recent email to 
someone who asked):

>We seeking permission to provide deep links link to the your web
>site within the online course mentioned above.  No content will be
>hosted, the request is to hypertext link only.

You require no consent to link to a page, at any depth in any 
web-site.  A link to a web-page is prettymuch equivalent to a 
citation, and citation does not require a licence.  That's because 
reproduction of that information is not part of the basket of rights 
that make up copyright.

The large publishing houses are trying to get copyright extended in 
all sorts of inappropriate ways.  Don't let yourself be a pawn in 
their hands!  See:
<http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/ETCU.html>http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/EC/ETCU.html
<http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/DarkAges.html>http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/DarkAges.html

Thanks for letting me know that you're linking to my site, what the
URL is (...) and for which course - gee, 500 students, that's good! 
It's nice to be used.

Could you please let the course supervisor know that there are more
recent and more advanced papers up there as well, indexed at ...


[For the record:

I assign copyright in everything I publish to my company.

In relation to the vast majority of materials, which are on the ANU 
site, I then grant a licence to anyone who wishes to copy / mirror 
them, provided that it's not-for-profit.

Any other use requires a licence, and usually a 'fee' (e.g. a copy of 
the CD or book that it's reproduced in).  See:
http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/CNotice.html

I keep hoping to find the time to prepare a paper on open content 
licensing.  In order to do that, I need to re-examine GNU and other 
open source licences, and some other material, extract the 
principles, and apply them to content.  Any references to literature 
on the topic gratefully received!]

-- 
Roger Clarke              http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/
			            
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Visiting Fellow                       Department of Computer Science
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