October is breast cancer awareness month. Many sites are going Pink for October to show their support. Hopefully those sites aren’t linking to Susan G. Komen for the Cure outside of the strict guidelines the foundation imposes. In fact, I broke the agreement just by linking to it.
“Links may only be established to the homepage of the Komen website. Links to any main section page or sub-section within, and/or any featured area of the sites, are prohibited.
When linking to the Komen websites you may use either a text link or the pink ribbon graphic. You must use hypertext only and it must be in the following form: ‘Susan G. Komen for the Cure.’ Any variation without written consent from Komen will result in immediate termination of your rights to link to the Komen websites.”
To be fair, Komen isn’t the only organization to use this strange legalese. What the lawyers who drafted this don’t understand is that you can’t control the Internet. They can’t stop me from linking to whatever page I want, however I want. Further, they really don’t want to stop me.
The Internet is all about linking. You can’t control the terms, because you can’t control the Internet, and it works better that way.
dang it Susan. Breast Cancer doesn’t have strict guidelines!
Any idea what the guidelines are there for? I don’t see the purpose behind it.
Wow, that’s almost comical.
That’s funny, I didn’t realize that I needed their rights to do whatever I wanted. Besides that, this type of link control is seen as “un-natural” by google. Whenever you always have the same anchor text, always pointing to the same place, it starts to look a little spammy. I wonder if they know that they may be unintentionally flagging their site as spam? I’m all for supporting the cause, but stupid people should have bad things happen to them (like being delisted from Google…)
The lawyers who right such stuff (and any judges who vindicate them) clearly live in their own little imaginary world. Wouldn’t it be nice of us to get them their own little real world to live in?
This is the old “deep-linking” argument, which I always found so silly. If you know how to use mod_rewrite, you can actually *prevent* anyone from deep-linking to your pages at all (and send them to your home page or to Hell).
So, there’s no need to threaten with legalese – just dig out the Apache manual and have at it (if you really don’t want all that traffic to your site).
I sure hope they don’t sue you! 😉