You need a paper licence to link to the Royal Mail website

http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/link-royal-mail/

by bensummers • 16 years ago

60 40 16 years ago

malcolmcoles.co.uk

jonursenbach• 16 years ago

Asinine.

swombat2• 16 years ago

Do they have any legal right to declare that you need their permission to link to their site?

I sure hope not.

jrockway• 16 years ago

Wait, are you saying I can't create a law by making a web page? Damn...

_delirium• 16 years ago

Oddly, that's been litigated more than you'd think, including in the context of links ("deep linking"): http://www.wilmerhale.com/publications/whPubsDetail.aspx?pub...

davidw2• 16 years ago

Boring. Someone, somewhere, is doing something stupid. Next...

bensummers• 16 years ago

... but in a new and amusing way?

This is another nice example of what happens when people who don't understand technology make rules about how you use technology.

davidw2• 16 years ago

I guess I'm old enough to have known that already.

elblanco• 16 years ago

No I don't http://www.royalmail.com/portal/rm/content1?catId=84200739&#...

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

I would like to see this tried with a server in Britain...

eli• 16 years ago

Sure, and the NFL says I need a special contract in order to describe the game I just watched. Organizations assert all kinds of crazy, bogus rights.

verdant• 16 years ago

I believe this is simply to protect them from unauthorized radio broadcasts of their games.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

Not to mention unauthorized church fundraiser TV viewings of their games.

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

No, it's more that radio broadcasts are the only things that they think they can practically control via their "authorizing". If they thought they could effectively make money shaking down backyard barbecues, they would be "simply protecting themselves" from "unauthorized" backyard barbecues as well...

It's a "simple" protection racket...

ratsbane• 16 years ago

Ha! This article contains five links to the Royal Mail web site.

arethuza• 16 years ago

Do you think someone should tell the Royal Mail about how to use a robots.txt file?

Because I can do a search for:

"You may not create a link to any page of this website without Royal Mail's prior written consent."

And get back lots of links... ;-)

I wonder if Google have one of these licenses to link?

Silhouette3• 16 years ago

Royal Mail also think they have a trademark on the colour red.

Seriously.

(These days they have had the grace to amend their claim, so it now says that it is only the colour red as used in their logo that is the trademark, but it didn't always do so.)

teamonkey3• 16 years ago

You can do that under UK law (probably elsewhere too). If your brand identity has a strong, identifiable colour scheme you can register it. I can't remember if it's a trademark or a designmark, but it falls under trademark law.

See also Orange, who have registered their shade of orange. The "Easy" brand (easyJet, easyEverything etc.) use a similar shade of orange across their brands. But Orange were there first and when easyMobile was started it wasn't allowed to use the traditional orange-coloured branding.

nkassis• 16 years ago

I don't remember where I saw this but I believe IBM has a certain shade of blue trademarked.

bobbyi• 16 years ago

Silhouette3• 16 years ago

Sure, you can be associated with a certain colour such that anyone else in your field who was using the same colour might be confused with your organisation, and the law might legitimately protect against the misrepresentation in that case.

IIRC, this is one of those legal issues where finding a case that actually went to court is quite difficult, because the major cases tend to settle instead, but perhaps there has been the occasional definitive ruling.

In any case, though, that is not what Royal Mail's wording used to say. They didn't claim, say, Pantone colour X. They claimed "red".

kjhgfvbhn• 16 years ago

So a company that makes their money from you buying stamps, has a pointless process that makes you send lots of letters, with lots of stamps.

Not so daft really !

FluidDjango• 16 years ago

Is it part of a UK-US alliance that Royal Mail take it upon themselves to make the USPS look relatively less backward?

In any case, this seems another example of a 20th Century operation seeking to function blindly in the 21st Century... with the result that its customers breathlessly await the day when some startup will put the operation (and thus its customers) out of their final misery.

teamonkey3• 16 years ago

The Royal Mail is one of those things that the average Briton will take for granted, moan about and generally dismiss as an ancient, outdated monstrosity, but sorely miss it after moving abroad.

See also: the NHS, EU consumer law and the BBC.

r7000• 16 years ago

Backward? Never. This is the company that changed its name to Consignia and ditched the Crown for a random second-rate swooshy circle thingy.

harshpotatoes• 16 years ago

Don't you also need a license to watch live television broadcast via tv or the internet in the uk? Somehow I don't find this license very surprising...

jdietrich4• 16 years ago

We do have a Television License but it is effectively a tax on any household that views television. The charge is £142.50 per year, which pays for the BBC, a broadcaster which is funded by, but independent of, the state. Our broadcast media is regulated rather differently than most. Compared to the US media we have incredibly liberal standards of taste and decency, especially past the 9pm watershed. All broadcasters have a legal duty to act with fairness and accuracy, a duty that is quite strictly enforced. The BBC has strict legal responsibilities regarding quality, which many believe leads to a positive halo effect in the broadcast media.

Although it is a contentious policy, especially amongst the tabloid press, the system works extremely well. The license fee is guaranteed to the BBC and ensures that they are immune from government interference. The BBC Trust regulates the actions of the BBC and ensures that they act in the public interest. Although I would not wish to cast aspersions, I can say that having scrutinised the broadcast media of most of the developed world I am personally quite happy with our system.

hexis• 16 years ago

"funded by, but independent of"

The philosophy of the American teenager is apparently alive and well in the UK.

eru• 16 years ago

> Our broadcast media is regulated rather differently than most.

Germany seems to operate a similar system. But there the broadcasters themselves can decide on how high the fee should be. Who does decide on that in the UK?

detst• 16 years ago

> Compared to the US media we have incredibly liberal standards of taste and decency, especially past the 9pm watershed.

I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding on this issue. Compared to US broadcast media, sure.

But you can find quite distasteful and indecent content on US TV 24/7. You just aren't as likely to find it on broadcast TV or basic cable. The FCC is really only concerned with broadcast TV. You'll find uncensored shows on channels like Comedy Central at night and beyond basic cable, everything is fair game.

jdietrich4• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, this clause would appear to have legal backing. The Computer Misuse Act 1990 states that a person is guilty of an offence if:-

(a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;

(b) the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and

The relevant wording is "causes a computer to perform any function". This is deliberately broad in order to cover botnets and the like, but would also amply cover deep linking. There is no requirement for the access to be from a computer you control, nor that you personally initiate the access; only that you caused a computer to perform an action with the intent of accessing data without authorisation.

Although unlikely, it is possible that any British website could be prosecuted for ignoring such a T&Cs clause. Prosecutions have been made under the Computer Misuse Act for very vague 'offences'.

I hope it isn't petty, but I'd just like to point out that our quaint little island does have it's own laws; I find it rather discourteous that some posters in this thread seem to have assumed that the whole of the internet is subject solely to the jurisdiction of the United States.

njharman2• 16 years ago

A link is text, a link does not cause any computer to perform any action, a link does not even "connect" to any computer. It's static data.

With proper software "activating" e.g. clicking on a link to uk mail's website may or may not cause one of their computers to perform some function.

If anything you'd need a license to click links, not make them. Unless there's even crazier "contributory computer performance" language in that Legislative Misuse Act of 1990

jdietrich4• 16 years ago

One does not need to "connect" to a computer to commit an offence under the act. One does not even need to use a computer. Consider, for instance, an attacker writing out a paper form with an SQL injection, knowing that the form will be OCRed into a database that does not sanitise it's inputs. Nothing but graphite on paper, but clearly computer misuse under the act.

I don't agree with the law as it stands, but the law was clearly designed to cover every possible circumstance of unauthorised access to a computer system.

As an analogy, imagine yourself walking down a shopping street. You have tacit permission to walk through any of the open shop doors, but that permission ends at the "no entry" sign on the stockroom door. Walking beyond a "no entry" sign is trespass because you are aware that you do not have permission to enter such a place. Likewise with authorisation to access a computer system. Your right to connect to the system ends at the point where the system tells you to go no further.

dctoedt• 16 years ago

If I were representing an accused linker, I'd be inclined to argue (among other things) that in view of longstanding, worldwide custom and usage:

1. Anyone who puts up a Web page is implicitly authorizing, nay inviting, all comers to access the page via normal protocols;

2. As a matter of law, the only way the implicit authorization can be negated is to deny access to the page, for example, by putting the page behind a password wall -- simply putting up a terms-and-conditions notice, that you don't even see before getting to the page, isn't enough (that's pretty much what the courts have held, at least in the US);

3. Therefore, any notice on the Web page that said "thou shalt not link to this page [or site]" would be of no legal significance.

A site that said "you can't link to me, even though I'm out here in the public square, so to speak," would be like a company that decided to hold a confidential business meeting at an outdoor restaurant table, put up a sign on the table saying "thou shalt not listen in," and then sued people who eavesdropped from the next table over.

imajes• 16 years ago

Their robots.txt:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /link/link

Disallow: /link/po

Disallow: /link/pw

Disallow: /link/rmg

Disallow: /portal/po

Disallow: /portal/pw

Disallow: /portal/rmg

Disallow: */print?

# 2007-04-12 www.royalmail.com robots.txt

so i assume anything else is fine?

You need a paper licence to link to the Royal Mail website

Related Stories