Blinkered Linkers
One of the things that you have to do when you set up a website is get your terms and conditions right. It's a chore. So what is it that most people do? Well, if you're lazy you mooch around the web, copy the T+Cs from someone else and tweak them a bit. If you want to be more professional about it you call a lawyer.
And what do you think that the lawyer does?
Yup, that's right. He copies them from someone else, maybe tweaks them a bit and charges you a fortune for the privilege.
One of the pieces of evidence for evolution is the existence of so called vestigial organs. The human appendix is cited as just such an organ. It doesn't really do anything it just sits there as a testament to our more vegetarian past when we needed a more ruminatory gut. Same thing applies to the coccyx or wings of an emu. There's an interesting analogue to vestigial organs with vestigial clauses in contracts. Some smart lawyer way back in the mists of time writes a contract that seems sensible at the time; it gets copied and tweaked, copied and tweaked, but the clause that seemed to make sense when it was written gets preserved way past its sell by date.
An interesting example of this was pointed out by Malcolm Coles in his excellent blog the other day. It covers sites that forbid you to link to them. You can imagine the lawyer at the dawn of the web thinking that linking to your site was an intrusion of privacy, so he wrote a clause that banned it. And then his lazy colleagues over time simply replicated it.
Amongst sites banning links (and how exactly are they intending to police this? The mind boggles) – are the BBC, Barclays Bank, Lloyds TSB, The Odeon, Ryanair and Shell.
There seem to be a few stock clauses that get recycled such as No third party is permitted to link any other web-site to this Site without obtaining our prior written consent (notice the quaint hyphen in web-site – only lawyer from loooong ago could have done that) or You are not permitted to create a link to any part of our Services other than the home page unless you have our prior written consent and you get dozens, even hundreds of these examples all over the web. See here
Seriously guys what are you thinking? Half the world is desperate to get links coming through to their sites in order to get their Search Engine ranking increased and the lawyers want to ban it? It's good to know that there are some honourable exceptions.
Take this Shopcreator customer, the British Library who have an admirable openness. "Other individuals and organisations wishing to make British Library content accessible through their websites are encouraged to create hypertext links to the required content on this website."
Another wise decision.
