Please excuse my ignorance if these guys are now owned by Ryanair, a quick Google suggests they are not, but it looks like Jetbird (an executive jet company) did a straight copy and paste of this for term 2.v.
"(v) You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair. Such consent may be withdrawn at any time at JetBird own discretion."
I wonder if Ryanair knows one of their competitors are using their T&C's. On the other hand, I wonder if Jetbird know they are listing one of their competitors on their website.
Very amusing to see this! Makes you wonder how many companies Ctrl+C Ctrl+V their T&C's and Privacy Policies from other websites.
When I hear lawyers and computers being talked about together, the first thing that comes to mind is that they tend to use WordPerfect. So, not only is it not safe to assume any level of computer savvyness, I'm not even sure that ctrl-f would be the right shortcut.
Google probably would get the permission to link to Ryanair, though. And Google has to look good in the eye of searchers. They want to find what they are looking for and don't really care about the reasons for some results to be not available.
But Google is in a unique position to quickly correct a lot of bad T&C behaviors simply by implying that having those terms may hurt the SEO of offending sites. If SEOs suspected that was part of Google's ranking process then we'd see a lot of bad T&C clauses suddenly dropped.
The perverse thing about terms forbidding deep linking into a website is that it is so easy to prevent deep linking by technical means. (In fact, it's so easy that even mentioning it seems like a cliche.) On each HTTP request, examine the Referer: header and, if you don't like it, redirect to your homepage. Is there any reason why companies like Ryanair don't just do this?
Because these companies don't really want to forbid deep-linking, but establish some kind of recourse (regardless of whether it is legally enforceable, or just scary and threatening) against anyone who might offend them in some way.
It's a blacklist, which inherently have their issues. Remember, this is Ryanair, that would mean their steward(esse)s have yet another task to do on their cell phones while supervising the boarding of 3 simultaneous flights.
Thanks for the information. I had not realised that. There are still plenty of other measure that Ryanair could use, of course, in the case where there was no Referer: header, such putting some unique (and constantly changing) id into a cookie such that links from another site wouldn't have the correct id. As other have suggested, perhaps they are perfectly happy with most deep links into their site, just not from certain sites such as price comparison sites. Far be it from me to speculate about such things, of course.
From context, I assumed we were talking about users following deep links. This can be prevented technologically by the target website, and the burden of circumvention is obviously on the user.
Obviously there is no technological way to prevent "deep linking" by the referring website, because that is just creating an <a> tag.
They do. Its just like signing a lease which indicates "no pets allowed" when everyone and their mother in the building has one, and the landlord knows. Its because if the clause is not in there and your dog is howling all night long they can do nothing. They may want content farms not linking, or perhaps other unknown super secret spy stuff?
It's more like walking into a store that has a tiny book on the floor inside the door that, if you open and read it, tells you that by having already entered the store you've agreed to be prohibited from telling anybody about anything you've seen inside without written consent.
How exactly would deoptimizing Ryanair hurt them financially? Do Ryanair customers search Google for anything but "Ryanair" when they want to get to ryanair.com?
True. But even with very few links, I suspect ryanair.com would come up high for a search for "ryanair". They get a bonus for an exact domain match. So no matter what they will probably come up high for searches for "Ryanair"
He's just using Ryanair as a general example. Maybe it wouldn't really hurt them, but it could have an effect on other companies with this dumb policy.
Dear cavedave, this is an official notice to remind you that "You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair" as per the Terms & Conditions. In your blog post, you have linked ryanair.com in the sentence containing:
3. You go to their terms and conditions here and see they do not allow linking to their website
Please kindly unlink or be prepared for further legal action.
I actually remember my boss telling me to put bullshit clauses in contract drafts so that those people have something to chew at and refrain from messing with the actual matter of the contract.
This is a well known tactic, and it works. When discussing a list of points in a meeting, the secret is to have a big controversial question come up first (that you don't actually care about): dealing with this first question eats up time, but what's better, it exhausts everyone. Then all the following points are much easier to sell.
"You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair. Such consent may be withdrawn at any time at Ryanair’s own discretion."
I wonder if Google have got written consent to link to Ryanair from their search results...
Suppose someone is found liable in civil court for deep linking to a website that prohibits it. What kind of damages could the website possibly be entitled to collect? I'm at a loss.
"(v) You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair. Such consent may be withdrawn at any time at JetBird own discretion."
http://www.flyjetbird.com/en/fns/Terms-of-Use.aspx
I wonder if Ryanair knows one of their competitors are using their T&C's. On the other hand, I wonder if Jetbird know they are listing one of their competitors on their website.
Very amusing to see this! Makes you wonder how many companies Ctrl+C Ctrl+V their T&C's and Privacy Policies from other websites.