The Pan Am games start in Toronto this week, and they have a remarkable demand on their website.
Links to this Site are not permitted except with the written consent of TO2015™. If you wish to link to the Site, you must submit a written request to TO2015™ to do so. Requests for written consent can be sent to [email protected]. TO2015™ reserves the right to withhold its consent to link, such right to be exercised in its sole and unfettered discretion.
Aww. That’s so cute. It makes me nostalgic for the old days when clueless lawyers would send cease-and-desist letters to people, telling them to remove any links to their precious and pure website.
Well, you heard the man. Don’t link to toronto2015.org, because that would be bad. Unless you’re evil like me, that is. I’m linking to them in order to drain their vital essence, and in order to send poisonous corruption up the web to toronto2015.org.
I never even heard of the Pan Am games before this! I’m also gnashing my teeth in frustration that their SIWOTI advertising campaign is working.
Apparently one of the sites writing about this emailed their given request address. It bounced.
The Olympics also did this a few years ago — and of course were widely and deliberately defied, by people who normally would have no interest in linking to some gigantic sports boondoggle.
Also, I’m glad I have reason to travel to my native city this week. I was there a few weeks ago, and they had signs up about traffic flow changes in force for the Games — driving must be a nightmare.
The text quoted at The Register seems to have disappeared from the TO2015 site, i.e. it looks like someone whacked their lawyers with a clue stick. There’s still restrictions on embedding and use of material from there, but that’s just normal copyright and fair-use stuff.
It would seem someone clued their lawyers in, the terms of use now state “Other sites may link to the Site with or without our authorization” and no reference to the Register’s quoted text remains.
That’s the kind of legal boilerplate you end up using when you buy it on a CD out of the bargain bin at Office Depot on Yonge St.
It’s a sporting event. They sport there. I think it’s for countries of the Americas (thus the name).
I don’t get it. Why would an organization be against free promotion of their event?
Err, no. I read it, this is what it says. (Maybe they changed it.)
“The links and interactive functionality for third party sites on the Site in no way constitute an endorsement by TO2015™ of these third party websites. Other sites may link to the Site with or without our authorization, and we may block any links to or from the Site. Your use of third party websites and resources is at your own risk.”
Here. It’s near the bottom of the page.
I tried sending a letter like that to the tax people regarding unauthorized use of my postal address and they totally ignored me! What does an upstanding citizen have to do?
@9: I bet you didn’t write your complaint in red ink, with the correct punctuation and capitalization of your name, like this: ::YOUR::NAME::
And now that you’ve read this advice, you owe me a US$200 consulting fee. In gold bullion.
Pen @9
You might talk to that nice Dr. Hovind about how to deal with the revenooers. He was able to swing a deal with them that included free room and board for eight years.
@10: That doesn’t work unless you phrase it as a question, does it?
The Anti-SEO creeps among us. It didn’t win this time…but the next…?
cervantes #8, it has now been changed. If you look at the archive.org versions prior to this, reported text was correct. They only recently changed it to be more reasonable.
There actually do seem to be a fair number of people who don’t get how links work. A few years back I was asked to put together a web site for a local non-profit event (because everyone knew I was a Computer Guy, and Computer Guys know everything about computers, right?). Knowing pretty much zilch about web design* at the time, I initially set up a WordPress site (which wasn’t very satisfactory) while I taught myself how to code up a site from scratch. After I got that all written and posted, I put a “We’ve moved to this other link” page at the WP site, for people who still had that URL bookmarked (Sitemeter showed a respectable fraction of our traffic coming through WP for a while, and few other orgs’ pages linked to there).
A few months later our chief organizer sent me an email saying “Please, remove all links to the WordPress site!!”. He didn’t seem to get that our new site had no links to the WP site, and that I had no control (beyond a polite email to the webmaster) over what URLs other people put on their pages.
However, one might think the organizers of a $2bn spectacle would be able to buy themselves better advice than a few volunteers running a non-profit community event.
*I’d now describe myself as a competent web-coder at the hobbyist level. Being a web designer requires, like, actual artistic skills….
PZ is the best.
I am not following that link!
Maybe they’re just smart and just reverse-psychologied the internet into linking to them.
Pan-Am games
: qualifying events for the Olympics….sports boondoggle… yes. If big-league pro sports ran this way, the New York Yankees would build a new stadium every year,with generous gov”t support. …P.S. I’m in Ontario… was in Toronto until 2 yrs ago.
I am much more surprised that you’ve never heard of the Pan American Games than discovering lawyers are clueless.
To #20: perhaps PZ agrees with me and with Stewart Lee about sports.
http://youtu.be/kI_el3-fxW4
Surprised that PZ has never heard of the Pan Am games. But embarrassed that the dumb fucks in my country thought they could stop people from linking to the web site. That’s clueless in the extreme. There must be some lawyers who understand how the internet works, no?
Further to that thought. What legal instruments do they think they have to prosecute those who violate this idiotic prohibition? Seriously. NOTHING! And people wonder why I have no trust in lawyers or bureaucrats.
I never heard of Pan Am games either. I was quite fond of their space shuttle though.
It’s pretty straightforward legal protection, in my opinion. I’ve been attaching the same clause to all my city and state tax bills and returning to sender with a note saying THIS LEGAL PERSON DENIES PERMISSION TO BE LINKED OR CONTACTED.
Now I don’t have to pay taxes.
That’s probably what they’re doing. Controlling their illegal tax bill from an illegal government infringement.
Getting angry about people linking to you is like getting angry about people dropping off cash-filled briefcases on your doorstep.
BTW PZ, did you know that you’re the defining example on urban dictionary?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=SIWOTI
Firstly, I don’t see why they would be against people linking to their website. Isn’t that just free publicity?
Secondly, I assume from PZ’s flagrant violation that their request isn’t enforceable. So why even bother?
Not to dispute the fact that some lawyers are clueless, but these decisions aren’t made by lawyers — they are made by corporate executives. The lawyers’ job is just to put the corporate policy, however ridiculous, in writing. In our work, we don’t challenge a client on policy unless its cluelesness touches on LEGAL issues, such as (1) it’s illegal; (2) it would expose the client to civil liability; or (3) the client wants me to bring a frivolous lawsuit. But a policy that’s stupid in a BUSINESS sense? Not my turf. A policy that shows an ignorance of technology or how the Internet works? Not my turf either. If a client wants me to draft a legal notice that makes no commercial or technological sense, my only concern is whether or not it’s illegal. As long as no one is going to be slapped with a fine or a costly lawsuit, I’ll just shrug my shoulders and do it. Hey, it’s like, an hour’s worth of billing.
Huh. Well, this is funny: the original (and only) source of this no-link demand is The Register; but the page reporting this warning is blocked. Is The Register a reliable source?
I couldn’t find the language cited anywhere on toronto2015.org, but I did find the website’s official legal notice here. As you can see, it’s long, boring, and disappointingly non-crazy. (And worth more than an hour’s billing.)
How sure are we this story isn’t just some tabloid BS?
Travis #14
Do you have a link?
Apparently it’s needed.
WHAT!??‽!?
MOI?
While this one example may not be true, there ARE a small number of web sites out there with very bizarre ideas of what they can or can’t “control”. Namely, “image leeching” is a term I haven’t heard since 2000 or so, but every now and then a few sites will toss out that term negatively viewing posting images from their web site “directly” without using the page, calling it “stealing bandwidth” or whatever excuse they have for being mad at using a site element they have already published in an “unauthorized” manner. These days, just about everyone else has accepted that’s just how the internet works and have built their sites and services AROUND the expectation it’ll happen.
Amused @30: The TO2015 site has been updated to something sane. The Wayback machine preserves older versions, like this from 22 July, which contain the text in question:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150622143456/http://www.toronto2015.org/terms-of-use
Um, that would be 22 June. It’s a Wayback machine, after all….
Surprised you’ve never heard of the Pan Am Games. That said I’m not having any trouble with the site.
Our Canadian Ladies 7 Rugby (and the men too for that matter ) smashed everyone to get the gold. Can’t wait for the Olympics next year when we can have a go at the NZ 7 team.
Speaking of SIWOTI, did you know you are quoted on the SIWOTI Urban Dictionary definition, PZ?
I always thought the Wayback Machine was a nickname for a site (I’d never gone there). Now I know. And that’s half the battle.
@Tony: Nope, its a gadget from a cartoon.
@33 sorry, but putting an image from someone else’s page inside and img element is plain nasty — depending on circumstances that can totally wreck someone’s hosting bill. And as much as I hate ads, it also can cut into some sites livelihood. Of course nowadays I mostly see anti-leeching redirects on plain old “screw the references to original author” sites of 9gag kind, but that’s different. And, finally, leeching is *nothing* like linking to someone. And sure, our crappy www does nothing to prevent this (but crafty server-side tricks do, but leeching impacts people without money to get devs the most), but that doesn’t mean it’s okay.
Also, links on some kinds of websites (think “link farms”) can actually hurt your ranking, and that causes micromanagers to freak out.
Amused wrote:
Wouldn’t you notify them that such a notice would be unenforcable? I don’t work in law, and I’ve certainly followed some ridiculous requests in doing my work, but I always make sure that they know that what they’re asking for isn’t going to work (partially to cover my ass, but to also try to get them to reconsider a foolhardy decision).
Not always. They have a reputation for not fully fact checking before running with their story.
In this case, it’s true. Eamon Knight pointed out the archived version of the terms of use page, and that language is present there. It seems they amended their terms to remove the ridiculous restriction.
Dark Jaguar wrote:
This is actually a pretty serious problem for small web sites. Since most sites have to pay depending on the volume of data transferred every billing cycle, embedding images from other sites can cost a significant amount of money, or use up your data quota for the month. The reason you don’t hear about it much is because it’s largely been dealt with using technological solutions (i.e. referrer checking) rather than the legal system.
A fair bit of the “image leeching” also came from commenters in web forums where they might link an image in their comment, and cause a huge inrush of traffic to the site. The rise of image hosting sites like TinyPic, PhotoBucket, and Imgur have reduced how often this happens, by letting comments posters upload their image to one of these sites, and then link it into their comment.
You do mean that is an hours worth of work. You are a lawyer. Billing is something totally different.
Base 4 hours minimum for legal services
Base 4 hours minimum for research services
Base 4 hours minimum for administrative services (up to 100 pages)
Plus an additional 1500 pages of copier services
Aggregate billing of $2827.36
Rounded to the nearest whole: Total billing $3000.00