CMP Blocking Inbound Links
Infoweek (whose parent company is CMP) has pulled this stunt before, although previously they merely posted a page on their website that said inbound links required preapproval. Massive protest seemed to have dissuaded them from that policy.
Early this morning, I posted a story from the Information Week Web site entitled, "Massachusetts Builds Open-Source Public Trough." The link to the story was contributed by long-time contributor Jason Greenwood. I surfed to the article, read it, and deemed it worthy for excerpting and linking from our site. I constructed the story and posted it, timing it to run at 1730 GMT (1230 EST).
What I did not know, and did not learn until late this afternoon, was that the publisher of Information Week, CMP Media LLC (a division of United Business Media plc), had apparently decided to block incoming links from Linux Today. I did not realize this because when I linked to the story directly from my system in Indianapolis, there was no block. (Nor, apparently, did Mr. Greenwood get blocked.)
Clearly, this is a block designed specifically for referring sites such as Linux Today. (Though, curiously, a link on NewsForge to the same story that has the exact same excerpt is currently allowed to go through unimpeded.)
I'm not sure the Fair Use claim Brian Proffitt really works. Brian would still be able to claim fair use to excerpt a piece of a story and repost it on Linux Today, provided that excerpt followed (relatively strict and, at the same time, very hazy) fair use guidelines. The difficulty is that Fair Use doesn't provide Proffitt (or Linux Today) to demand that Infoweek (or any publication) accept inbound links.
So while this seems to run against the spirit of the Web in general, my sense ist that Infoweek/CMP have finally figured out what was a really pretty simple end-run around the spirit of the Web.
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Posted by johndan at March 21, 2004 11:03 PM
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