OSDev.org

I am currently working on a web page (personal home server) and I would like to place some "deep" links to specific WiKi pages.

Standard laws only allow me to "legally" link to the home page - and I cannot find any information about this on the WiKi (or it's in a hard place to locate) thus why this post was created.

So, the only question is do we have permission for deep links, and what restriction (if any) apply?

And for reference my page has to deal with the design and implementation of my operating system.




Thanks,

B!

I was puzzled when I read your question as I thought WTF? But a little research reveals that many do actually regard deep linking as illegitimate. I am now amazed now rather than puzzled. Would the author of a reference book object if I gave a reference to page 32 of their work? I think not; I suspect they would be pleased.

I'll be interested to see the answer from the site owners and very much hope that it is of the form "Go ahead, you're welcome.".

As far as I get the legalese, deeplinking has never actually been illegal. It's forms of abuse, circumvention, misrepresentation and that sort of things that cause the trouble.

Deeplinking to individual pages is perfectly fine as sharing the content is the obvious purpose of a wiki. We even have BBcode tags to facilitate just that.

Although there are cases were deep linking would be illegal, I can't see how that would apply to a wiki. It's not like images or binaries were it makes the site-owner pay for bandwidth without getting the visitor to it's site. We don't have adsense here but even if there was it would only get (potentially) more legitimate views on those ads. So.. I'm still at WTF?!

I can't imagine a reality were this would be an issue.

Deep linking is illegal??? Pretty much every link I've seen is "deep" (if that means what I think it means, to link to a page other than the site's homepage or front page); I hate it when people just link to the front page of a website and expect me to find the relevant content myself (e.g. "read more about this topic in an article from <insert name of online newspaper>", but the link only links to the newspaper's website and you have to search to find the relevant article - or just close the page, as I often do).

That is what I figured. I'm just in a gray area with the ISP and want absolutely no reason for an AUP violation notice.