Howard Knopf, a Canadian trademark lawyer who is now director for the Center of Intellectual Property Law at Chicago's John Marshall Law School, said organizers have no legal authority to prevent people from simply linking to the website.
"If they leave their website open, it's like a public park, people are free to walk in it, and a link is just the most efficient way to get there," he said.
Meanwhile, AP has more on the Olympic blogging ban.
The media's finally picking up on the petty and heavy-handed restrictions in place here in Athens that I've been banging on about since I arrived.
Those mentioned linking restrictions actually make sense.
ReplyDeleteThere are too many bogus websites on the net using frames techniques to have pages of others appearing in the lower frame of their own sites. The upper frame is then supplied by them, mostly just in the form of some rotating banner.
Search engines usually do not recognize this and the average surfer is just wondering about the casino popup on top of the (in this case) official Olympics' website.
Other sites do similar things: Check the page of "Laureus World Sports Awards" at http://www.laureus.com/ and read their Terms & Conditions.
k2
Hands up all of those that AREN'T sure what the word 'web' in World Wide Web implies? (The 'L' word is a clue...)
ReplyDelete...oh, and k2: I think we'll find that there's 'slightly' more web sites linking to other websites in conventional ways than there are those that link within framesets! Besides, if that's the issue here, why don't those sites looking to protect themselves simply run a short Javascript routine checking that their site is not framed - it's incredibly easy to do!
Stuart (not Mr. Hughes! :)
Good old WWW days are long gone... It is very simple these days to set up a premium link to a valuable content site and charge people for accessing that link. Plenty of sites do that and earn money through their so called "traffic signs". Just trust the creators of athens2004.com. They have done their research on this.
ReplyDeletek2