On Wed, 29 Mar 2000 17:23:37 -0800, Ken wrote:
>"Peter J. Holzer" wrote:
>> >This raises another issue with violating the TOS of several service
>> >providers such as the major ones like geocities, xoom, and my own
>> >ISP who forbid linking to files directly from other web pages. It
>> >may not be a problem for you but you may jeopardize other people's
>> >accounts.
>>
>> This seems to be a rather unfair policy. If I put a link from my
>> site to one of your pages you may not even find out (do you get the
>> referrer logs from your provider?) and in any case you cannot do
>> anything against it. Apart from that it is of course totally against
>> the spirit of the WWW to forbid links.
>
>I provide links to well over a 1000 web pages. I do not however provide
>links to the downloadable material on those sites. There is a distinct
>difference.

Indeed. I just didn't understand that you meant "non-html files" when
you just wrote "files". Linking directly to anything but HTML is
problematic (and often considered rude) because it takes the document
out of the context.

Still, penalizing a customer for something he has no control over
strikes me as unfair. However, as long as there isn't a monopoly, I
don't care if some particular provider has a policy I don't like - I can
always find another.

	hp

-- 

|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR     \ Durchbruch in der Bionik, und Microsoft geht
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