No links, please, we’re lawyers

I’m going to be reposting some blog posts that I made years ago in other places. This one is from 2011 and turned up in my mind because…

I’m going to be reposting some blog posts that I made years ago in other places. This one is from 2011 and turned up in my mind because I’ve been moving old emails from one provider to another, and one of those had a reference to this blog post.

For reasons too boring to go into, I was recently looking at the legal disclaimer page of the web supermarket Ocado. Something odd caught my eye: a sentence beneath the heading “Basis of Access”: You may not create a link to this website from another website or document without Ocado Group plc’s prior written consent. This is a very stupid thing to put in a website’s terms, especially when it’s in there twice. Ocado and its lawyers ought to know better. And they’re clearly not bothering to enforce it, something a simple Google search will show.

What I wondered was whether anyone else, eight years later, was still foolish enough to be attempting to prevent inbound links in their terms and conditions. It turns out that the answer is “yes”.

A quick search for the words “terms and conditions” combined with “create a link” turned up two sites that are seeking to stop people linking to them, for some reason

I couldn’t find a terms page on Ocado Group’s website, and the Spurs website terms appear to no longer worry about people linking to the site. What astonished me is that eight years on Odeon is still trying to stop you linking to its website. Whoops.

Original post (August 1, 2011):

What connects Ocado, Odeon cinemas and Tottenham Hotspur?
They all have very stupid anti-linking policies on their websites

For reasons too boring to go into, I was recently looking at the legal Disclaimer page of the web supermarket Ocado.

Something odd caught my eye: a sentence beneath the heading Basis of Access:

You may not create a link to this website from another website or document without Ocado Group plc’s prior written consent.

And further down, there’s something similar:

Links to this website are not permitted without the prior written consent of Ocado Group plc.

This is a very stupid thing to put in a website’s terms, especially when it’s in there twice. Ocado and its lawyers ought to know better. And they’re clearly not bothering to enforce it, something a simple Google search will show.

UPDATE: Ocado’s PR people have got in touch to say that they are changing their terms as we speak. They also pointed out that the terms we were talking about were for Ocado Group’s corporate website, not the main shopping one.

I thought the battles over linking had all been fought back in the 1990s. And even then, the newspapers were fighting to prevent ‘deep-linking’ to articles. The above terms try to prevent people from even linking to the site’s homepage.

It turns out I’m not alone in thinking this behaviour is very silly. Malcolm Coles has been compiling lists of offending sites for some years now — you can see his 2011 list here, and it includes such big names as Odeon cinemas, Tottenham Hotspur FC, Shell, the British Medical Journal and Lloyds TSB.

Some of the sites, after being named and shamed, contacted Malcolm to say they’d be changing their policies (well done, the NUS, BMJ and University of Nottingham), but most remain in place.

And yes, I did have to check this website’s own terms document, just to be sure, and no, we don’t prevent anyone from linking to us.