Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

News.com has a story about a great site called DontLink.com. DontLink is as site created soley to point out the ignorance and stupidity of other sites that purport a "no linking to us" policy.

Its amazing how many sites proclaim this. "The International Trademark Association, The American Cancer Society, The City of Colorado Springs, Gay Wired, Texas Instruments, Shell Oil, The Washington Post, Disney, Motorola, The Chicago Sun Times, the Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, Carfax, Matsushita, Autodesk, the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Michigan.gov and Law.com."

Some sites have apparently recently changed this policy, probably in no small part thanks to DontLink. For example NPR, which is one of the headliners on the TotSP home page (through NewsIsFree) has had such a policy in the recent past, but now it is a different story. (I just checked their terms and now they ALLOW linking and "encourage" it, hmmmm.)

At any rate, any site that does this is ridiculous. That itself is not surprising. Sure people will try to say "dont link to us", but the Internet is a PUBLIC NETWORK. That is like putting a sign on a street corner and making it illegal for people to read it. Dont want it linked, DONT POST IT ON THE INTERNET. The surprising thing is that in many court cases both in the US and abroad this link ban has been UPHELD!

Again, ridiculous.

For more see the linked news.com story.
  Dontlink.com does just that: news.com