You've got another link coming
As part of an earlier post, Marc questioned the proper etiquette of linking to subscription-only Web sites. Not surprisingly, the world of bloggers has already generated a fair amount of digital ink on this very topic. In one relevant post from last year, Denis Howell at "Bag and Baggage" outlines some of the legal scuffling between online publications and people who link directly to the printer-friendly (read: ad-free) pages of those publications. She also provides a link to Declan McCullagh's Politech in which Slashdot's Robin Miller makes the case for linking "to ad-laden pages on commercial sites instead of directly to images or to pages that do not allow their publishers some benefit from our link to them." I tend to agree with Miller on this point, and I think the logical corollary to this proscribes the direct posting of content from subscription-only sites. Excerpts, maybe, but not full articles.
