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.