I don't understand NPR's concerns at all. How could someone set up a radio station and try to profit off of NPR's feeds, since they are all going to open in a Real Audio player anyway?

Are they worried that people will try to set up fake NPR web sites and ask for pledges or something? Again, as you've pointed out repeatedly, that would be outright fraud and you don't need any special linking policy to cover that.

It just looks like they've done all of this for much the same KPMG folks had their anti-linking policy -- some dumbass lawyer somewhere probably told them it's a standard operating procedure and they've bought into it.

Edited by author 06-28-2002 07:15 PM
I'm going to disagree with you here. There's a fundamental difference between linking to an NPR webpage and linking directly to their audio/video streams. Linking to their media bypasses the NPR website entirely and allows a commercial organization to seamlessly rebrand NPR's content as their own, while draining their bandwidth and server resources. In a sense, I think this issue is a lot closer to image inlining than deep linking.

To me, deep linking their streaming media is akin to capturing their media files and serving it up from your own web server. (At least it doesn't consume their bandwidth!) The legality of that is a different issue entirely.

If that's what they're concerned with, fine. But the problem is that NPR's linking policy doesn't distinguish between the two. And there's a really simple technical solution if they're only concerned about deep linking of their media: refuse access to any user following an offsite link by excluding offsite referers.

Instructions on how to do this with Apache are readily available. They should be able to apply this to Realaudio, Windows Media and Quicktime streams without too much effort.

I'm with waxpancake: they aren't differentiating between the notion that scammers might try (somehow? I don't know who is making money in this fashion) to treat NPR as a pure content source without credit or even using their Web pages, and the rest of the world. They have legal tools for the former, as well as technological fixes! Go go waxpancake.