…and Hiltzik is not alone in his breach, Patterico, LA Observed, Media Bistro, Independent Sources and 24,620 or so other blogs or blog postings have violated the published terms of service of the Los Angeles Times web site.

In fact, this very sentence you are reading violates Los Angeles Times web site policy which states:

Links to, and frames of, Latimes.com. If you operate a Web site and wish to link to Latimes.com, you may link only to the home page, www.latimes.com, and not to any other page or subdomain of Latimes.com.

This limitation is of course completely out of touch with accepted blogging protocol. A blogger would be criticized heavily for referencing a work and then sending people to the home page of the referenced site (essentially saying ‘good luck finding my original source!’). Blogging is supposed to be about transparency and there is nothing transparent about the anachronistic legalese of LAT’s terms of service.

And what would happen if the Times decided to employ the terms of service, for example to silence its media critics? According to the Electronic Freedom Foundaton web site:

Most people are happy to have other websites link to them. Indeed, “permalinks” for each blog post, to which others can link directly, are one of the features that have helped blogs and blog conversations take off. But some website owners complain that deep links — links that lead readers to an internal page on a website — “steal” traffic to the homepage or disrupt the intended flow of their websites. For example, Ticketmaster has argued that other sites should not be permitted to send browsers directly to Ticketmaster event listings. Ticketmaster settled a claim against Microsoft and lost a suit it had brought against Tickets.com over deep linking. See Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com. So far, the courts have found that deep links to web pages are neither copyright infringement nor trespass. No court has enforced a website’s terms of use that bar deep linking.

Out of touch, unenforceable, and ignored by internal/external bloggers, the LAT.com terms of service are in massive need of updating.

While on the subject of LAT.com TOS, another area they might want to revise is with their “no flaming” provision which currently only applies to user-generated content and not to Times columnists. Having been recently called “stupid” and a “dupe” by one of their columnists, we would support such a change.

tags: los angeles times LA Times hiltzik

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 11:41 pm by Insider and is filed under Blogging, Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.