Newspaper sites: don’t read or link to us …
How will other newspapers react to the Guardian opening up their content for free via 'Open Platform'?
If their website terms & conditions are anything to go by, they have a long way to go to embrace the internet.
Mirror: no linking
It's fairly standard for any publication to forbid people from copying its material. But some papers have gone so far with their site T&Cs (quoted below) that you're not allowed to link to - or even read - their website. Legal departments: can I suggest you review these ... They kind of conflict with all those 'share' buttons you have!
Daily Mirror: no linking
Clause 2.1: "You also agree not to deep-link ... to the Site for any purpose, unless specifically authorised by MGN Ltd to do so."
(The Mirror's T&Cs are so badly drafted that most of them are repeated at the bottom - someone has pressed copy and paste by mistake ...)
The Sun: no linking
Clause 10: "Unauthorised linking to the website is prohibited"
Telegraph: all fine as of 3pm
This used to say "you must not deep-link to ... any part of the Site without our prior written consent. " But within 5 hours of my pointing this out on twitter, they had deleted it! So no problems there now ...
Independent: confused
On the one hand: "Third parties are permitted to link to stories within INM websites, using the URL and quoting the headline and the source website." On the other: "Third parties must not deep-link to ... any part of the Website. "
Daily Mail: no linking
"You may not provide a link to this web site from any other web site without first obtaining Associated's prior written consent."
FT: no reading at work
Only read it for personal reasons, not for business ones: "If you are using FT.com in an "at work" capacity ... and your use extends beyond personal, non-commercial use then you should contact FT's Content Sales Team at FTSales.Support@ft.com to discuss your business requirements." Do they apply this rule to the paper, too?
Times: no linking
"unauthorised ... linking to the Website is prohibited".
I would link to the T&Cs, but I'm not authorised ... 
None of this, of course, stops various newspapers including paid links on their pages ...
[...] posted here. Written by Malcolm Coles - Visit [...]
Newspapers are already going the way of the dinosaur. If this is their way of rendering themselves completely irrelevant, they are doing a bang-up job.
"Newspapers are already going the way of the dinosaur. If this is their way of rendering themselves completely irrelevant, they are doing a bang-up job."
It's an oft-overlooked fact that news comes from newspaper newsrooms -- not from news fairies. If you watch TV or listen to radio or visit web sites, you see and hear people reading newspapers and find stories produced by newspaper staffs. If you're talking ink-on-paper vs. how to run a news site correctly, that's another discussion.
Malcolm
Thanks for pointing this out. As you saw, we deleted it as soon as we heard about it. I'm afraid it say more about the relevance of Ts and Cs than the various papers' attitude to linking.
Ian Douglas, head of digital production, telegraph.co.uk
I'm sure it does say more about the T&Cs (and I've been there ...!) - clearly no one actually enforces these rules. I've never even looked at them before - I was just checking what other papers' conditions were after the Guardian's Open Platform launch. Still, maybe this will persuade legal teams not to worry about them so much.
[...] *For instance, I just found out, via Twitter, that most British newspapers' Terms & Conditions say you're not allowed to link to their websites. Fail! [...]
Malcolm, Thanks for spotting this - it's being fixed for Mirror.co.uk. David
It was the same in Local Government, in 2006, according to Public Sector Forums, and apparently still is.
[...] to see that Malcolm Coles’ recent blog post, which highlighted newspapers’ terms and conditions forbidding linking from their websites, [...]
This is like a role call of publishers...
We also will be allowing people to actually link to our website shortly, else we have a few thousand people in breach!
Thanks for letting me know, James. This is rather a high-level conversation, isn't it!
[...] Newspaper sites: don’t read or link to us … » malcolm coles - Signs of why the openness at the Guardian causes so much of a stir in the journalism industry. [...]
[...] can read their full comments on the original post, here. Most people at newspapers clearly had no idea their T&Cs banned other sites linking to them, [...]
Public Sector Forums' list has been updated.
If a site has authentication to link to this restricted site, the content crawled/parsed by a search crawler will also encompass a link to this "banned' resource. Odd.
[...] are newspaper sites that don’t want links and there are government sites that don’t allow linking, but maybe Maple Leaf Foods bloggers [...]
[...] to the T&Cs just in case! (This follows on from my posts last year in which I pointed out that most major newspapers and many other organisations forbade you from linking to [...]
[...] it in its terms and conditions. Can this still be going on, more than a year after I revealed that most newspapers banned deep links, as did brands like Apple, Royal Mail, Channel 4 and, er, the Association of Online Publishers [...]
[...] to their site. Malcolm has written several blogpost on this subject, the first one being a list of UK newspapers which has this no linking policy, then the second blogpost gives another list of major UK companies including the AOP (Association [...]
Google must have lots of paperwork somewhere with all those licenced links.