Bill Gates, Man United and 20 other sites that ban linking to them

I think the typical email about links from around that time was for SEO optimization. They would request that you link to their site from a high ranking domain in exchange for a link from them back to you.

Why would you email them for their permission? Are you nuts?

+1

People disagreeing with your or shocked by you might not remember (or maybe are too young?) the Internet of the 1990s. Search engines sucked, directories were the thing, and putting your site in a directory or linking to a website was, sociologically + relatively speaking, a pretty big deal.

Back then, there was no expectation that a website was publicly available to everyone, even though it was accessible if you knew the URL. Sort of like today people don't share their home addresses or photos of their living rooms unless there's a good reason to do so.

EDIT: a better example in relation to today might be Tor addresses or dark web URLs.

It was widespread, but so was mockery of the concept of needing permission to link.

Sure, and I remember thinking the practice was just as stupid then (and in the 90s) as it is now.

Being on the internet since 1997, I can't remember anything liked that needed.

I wasn't having a homepage back then, but I was interested in having one, so I've read quite a few resources about that way back.

What I can remember, is something like website rings (or something like that) where people joined some group of homepage owners and kept a list of links to each other (and / or a "next" and "previous" link to someone else's homepage).

High level of delusion about ownership of other people and their actions.

It can be a little wishy washy.

stuff like /about or /contact -might- not be considered a deep link depending on the opinion of whomever is running the site.

Probably so if they accidentally upload a confidential document they can claim that anybody who downloaded it (or shared the URLS) violated their T&Cs

Typically it's about media and means e.g. embedding media from their site into yours, or linking directly to that media. If you link directly to an image, say, the user won't see the target website's content, which they might object to.

The lawyer writing that knows that it doesn't matter very much whether the copyright holder regards something as infringement, it matters what courts think, and to the extent that these theories have been tested in court, they have generally failed[1]. You might as well say that you regard "deep linking" as treason punishable by death. They're just trying to frighten people.

[1] eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com....

It’s happened before: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=manchester+united

In theory they could check the referer and redirect requests containing the referer to the front page. Or to a page that says "Violation detected". Or to a picture of testicles like a particular non-fan of Hacker News does when his site sees this site in the referer URL.