[Infowarrior] - Violating Terms of Use by Default

[Richard Forno]

Here's another case of some idiot firm trying to declare who can lnk  
to them via their ToS:

Violating Terms of Use by Default
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/19/violating-terms-of-u.html

Buried in the Terms of Use of a very interesting and potentially  
valuable site called Newssift, a just-launched service from the  
Financial Times:

"You may be granted a limited, nonexclusive right to create a  
hyperlink to Newssift.com Web provided (i) you give FT Search Inc.  
notice of such link by writing to privacyofficer at newssift.com...."

Two items of lunacy here:

1)  They want this on a link-by-link basis?
2)  The address they want you to "request permission" to link to them  
is their privacy officer.  Does that mean this person is going to be  
doing nothing more than responding yay or nay to link requests under  
this policy?  And why the privacy officer? Granted it probably goes to  
their legal folks, but is "privacy"  that somehow synonymous with "IP  
rights management" now?

-rf