Posts from Saturday, March 12th, 2005

Deep Linking, Shallow Thinking

Published 19 years, 6 days past

So a few weeks ago you might have noticed a bit of brouhaha that surrounded the new Terms and Conditions for Orbitz.com, set to go into effect today.  For anyone who missed or forgot about it, a refresher:  in Section 6, you find this wonderful bit of total cluelessness:

We reserve the right to require you to remove links to the Site, in our sole discretion.

Linking to any page of the Site other than to the homepage is strictly prohibited in the absence of a separate linking agreement with Orbitz.

So under their Terms and Conditions, it would be forbidden for me to point to a press release that announces Orbitz suing some former employees; or to their mangled-markup list of press releases; or, for that matter, to a medium-resolution JPEG of the Orbitz logo (which is rather ominously referred to in the Terms and Conditions as a “Mark of Orbitz”, which sounds like something that might have been mentioned in the first draft of the Book of Revelation).

It should be noted, however, that Section 4 of the old Terms and Conditions contains this amazing little gem:

You agree not to create a link from any Web site, including any site controlled by you, to our site.

Because nothing could be worse than increasing traffic to your site.

So yes, this post is in complete violation of the both the old and new Terms and Conditions for Orbitz.com.  And if I had ever been, or ever planned to be, a customer of Orbitz—thus agreeing to said Terms and Conditions—that might actually bother me for a second or two.  But, as they say:

If you do not accept all of these terms, then please do not use these websites.

Boys, you got yourselves a deal.


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