A recent article in ASAE’s Technoscope newsletter discusses how copyright laws could be applied to hyperlinking.  The following excerpt describes the risk you may attach to yourself (or organization) by linking to another site:

“Taking the concept of copyright infringement one step further, if Association A provides a hyperlink to Association B?s Web site, which contains infringing material, Association A could be held liable under the theory of contributory infringement. Such claim would be in addition to the copyright owner?s claim against Association B for copyright infringement.

Contributory infringement occurs when an individual or organization knowingly induces, causes, or materially contributes to the infringing conduct of another, the essential elements being knowledge of and participation in the infringement.”

So how does pointing to another page on the Web materially contribute to the infringing conduct of another? Seems like a stretch to me given that links are essentially bibliographic references (imho).  

Jakob Nielsen weighs in on usability for seniors:

“Websites tend to be produced by young designers, who often assume that all users have perfect vision and motor control, and know everything about the Web. These assumptions rarely hold, even when the users are not seniors. However, as indicated by our usability metrics, seniors are hurt more by usability problems than younger users. Among the obvious physical attributes often affected by the human aging process are eyesight, precision of movement, and memory.”

Joel Spolsky has reviewed a set of books that he thinks every programmer should read. In addition to outright programming, he discusses books on UI, managing people, making a difference in the world. It is a great list.

A case is heading to court in the European Union on the legality of deep linking to content on another web site. (A ‘deep link’ is one that links to something other than the home page for that web site.) A newspaper in the Netherlands is trying to block a web site from linking to its content.

Here is my opinion on the issue of deep links:

Misrepresentation of content ownership via framing of pages or content-scraping without permission: BAD.

Normal links to pages anywhere within any site: GOOD.

The thing to note here: the BAD category actually has nothing to do with linking to content. It is the same as traditional copyright infringement and is achieved through techniques other than a standard HTML link. 

Outlawing deep links to other web sites is like outlawing page references in bibliographic citations: a link is merely an HTML tag that provides a citation to another page on the web.