This has been circulating around a variety of web blogs. KPMG, the tax and audit firm, has decided that unauthorized links to their site are Bad and Evil and Not To Be Tolerated. You can find their site here.
Wired has a nice story on the controversy, and you can read the nastygram they sent to the First Offender Who Blabbed.
A recent audit of Web sites, to which KPMG is hyperlinked, has revealed that www.corporateanthems.raettig.org contains a link to KPMG’s Web site, www.kpmg.com. Please be aware such links require that a formal Agreement exist between our two parties, as mandated by our organization’s Web Link Policy.
Actually, they don’t, per previous federal court judgments. According to US District Court Judge Henry Hupp, in the Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com case:
“Hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library’s card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.
So long as there’s no deception as to whom the page belongs to, it’s perfectly legal (and is, in fact, a key to the web).
So there.