KELVIN SMITH LIBRARY

Orbitz stupid license terms

Chalk one up for the folks the lawyers who came up with Orbitz stupid license terms. Follow the link and scroll down to item number 6. Or, just read it here:

6. Links to third party sites

Outbound Links

For your convenience, our Site provides links to other sites. When you click on one of these links, you are leaving our site and entering another site. We are not responsible for such third party websites.

You should carefully review the terms and conditions of use of these sites, because these terms will apply to your visit to these other sites.

Inbound Links

We welcome links from a third party site to the home page of our Site, through a plain text link, provided that (a) you give Orbitz prior written notice of such link by contacting Orbitz Customer Service, to request Orbitz's permission to establish the link; (b) you discontinue providing a link to our Site if so requested by Orbitz; (c) you do not imply in any fashion that Orbitz is endorsing any of your products or service or is affiliated with you, (d) you do not present Orbitz in a false light, or provide misleading or false information about Orbitz, or its Site or Services, (e) you do not remove or obscure the copyright notices, or other notices on this Site; (f) you do not use any Mark of Orbitz; and (g) you do not replicate, frame or mirror the content of the Site.

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.

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So, by linking to their new terms this page violates their license agreement. Not only that, it violates it in multiple ways.

1. It uses the Orbitz graphic logo to provide a link to something other than their homepage
2. Orbitz permission to link to them was not sought in advance
3. It uses their "Mark" rather than a plain text link

It does not violate the clause (d) re: representing Orbitz in a "false" light. It quotes their site and speaks disapprovingly of their license but does not perpetrate a falsehood.

There are far more effective ways to keep people from deep linking your site, especially a site that is database served such as Orbitz. Oops! I did it again! The simplest of these is to require that the HTTP-REFERRER for any page that is not the home page be on your domain and to redirect all others to the home page. This is extremely do-able, especially if you are using Apache as your HTTPDaemon, even on a Windows box.

I'll let you know if they come after me.