We’re still confused by some news publications’ war against those who send them traffic. We’ve already covered some newspapers choosing technical means of blocking aggregators, which is effective cutting off your nose to spite your face, but what about just claiming that it’s illegal? That seems to be the plan of a major Icelandic newspaper, who has put up a new policy that bans ” repeated and systematic” linking to the website (Boing Boing’s coverage implies it bans all deep linking, but that does not appear to be the case). This definitely seems targeted at aggregators, but I’m really not sure how that makes much of a difference anyway. First off, blocking links seems like a silly way to go about running a media publication, but second, just declaring that it’s not allowed doesn’t make much sense. If you really don’t know how to capitalize on incoming traffic, then just use technical means. Insisting “it’s not allowed” when your webserver says “yes, it’s allowed!” doesn’t make much sense.
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