Today in the mail came a letter from the American Education Services, AES, regarding their privacy policy. AES is one of the nation’s largest student loan and financial aid resources in the country and to who I still owe money, but I’ve only ever received bills from them. Skimming through several pages to see what it was all about, I made the assumption that it wasn’t a bill and was just information, it could be filed away. Upon filing it, I happened to look at the back of the last page and saw the following,

AES expressly forbids others to link to an AES website without gaining authorization from AES first.
If you wish to link to an AES website, contact AES at:

Website Linking
PHEAA
1200 North 7 th Street
Harrisburg, PA 17102-1444

ecomm@aessuccess.org

Pretty odd if you ask me. A quick Google search shows only 287 inbound links to the AES website, a very low number for such a large and established website.

The same Google search I did to find the information about their not wanting inbound links (which is verbatim from the letter I have), also sent me to this advertising page of their site. Could it be that they want to control the inbound links so they can dictate the traffic the site gets in order to profit more from the sale of ads?

Yet another Google search lead me to this law and information site which seems to give a big middle finger to the above mentioned concept of forbidding links to a site

In the major U.S. deep linking case, Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com (2000) the court ruled that hyperlinking doesn’t violate the Copyright Act.

In the first opinion U.S. District Judge Harry Hupp wrote, “Hyperlinking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act. There is no deception in what is happening. This is analogous to using a library’s card index to get reference to particular items, albeit faster and more efficiently.”

So, my links stay, just because they can.

http://www.aessuccess.org/ (homepage)
http://www.aessuccess.org/about/pp.shtml#7 (privacy policy about inbound links)

Resource: NetGraf

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