Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Deep linking

Author:Jacob Levy
Posted:7/27/1999; 7:50:57 AM
Topic:Deep linking
Msg #:8790
Prev/Next:8789 / 8791

The piece about Universal objecting to people linking to pieces of their web site brings up interesting legal issues. However, if they don't like what people are doing they can easily prevent it with a bit of application of technology. Here's one brain-dead-simple scheme: suppose that Universal identifies the set of pages that you can link to; each of these pages will place a cookie into your browser, and only those pages will. The cookie expires after a very short while, let's say 30-60 minutes. The pages to which you're not supposed to link check for the presence of the cookie; if the cookie is not present, they redirect you to the front page of the site. If the cookie *is* present, it is refreshed so that the expiration is pushed out another 30-60 minutes into the future and the page is served. The net result: you can only see the internal pages if you came into the site through one of the "blessed" pages.

Questions:

Is this scheme sound?

If it is, doesn't the existence of such a simple technical scheme invalidate any legalistic objections that Universal has?

Isn't this kind of scheme very simple to implement with Frontier?

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