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Subject:Re: linking to sites - naive question From:Iain Harrison <iharrison -at- SCT -dot- CO -dot- UK> Date:Fri, 27 Sep 1996 15:27:32 GMT
I don't know if this is the case in the US, but in the UK, an author gets a
(small) royalty payment every time someone borrows a copy of that author's
book from a public library. The most popular authors make a good living
from these payments, so no wonder they don't need to be asked!
More relevantly, I think that there is no problem with providing a link to
a site which takes the browser to that site.
The issue is about using a graphics from that site, whether stored locally
or remotely, on another site's pages. I think that using such a graphic for
other purposes would be breach of copyright.
Using a graphic to make the link to the site a more visually-appealing one
by including it on the page with the link, although possibly technically a
breach of copyright, would be accepted as OK by most people.
It would be nice to tell webmasters of the link as a matter of courtesy,
though. I have some pages on a particular subject in a series of about a
dozen, but page 5 gets more hits than the others, and the web logs indicate
that many people arrive at that page, then go to and fro from there.
Presumably there must be a popular link to it, but I can't find it!