Some of you may have heard about the controversy that was raised when several blogs linked to the “This American Life” program MP3 which was publicly available on their server. The only difference was those sites links were in the form of a enclosure with a standard reference hyperlink in a RSS feed.
According to the blogs in question “This American Life: staff had requested that the blogs stop what they claimed was illegal linking of the file. Remember now that this file was as publicly available and did not need you to be in a password controlled site to gain access to that file.
The uproar obviously was over the take down request in my opinion they had no right to ask people to stop linking to the files. The bloggers complied but it appeared that “The American Life” staff was willing to take it through the legal process. What is a shame here is when people do not have a clue on how the web works.
I wrote to the staff and said that I thought it was wrong that they request people to quite linking to the file and if they did not want people to access the file that they should have put it in a place where people could not get to it versus placing it on a public server
Today they replied that they had locked the program files down and indicated that they were sad that people legally accessing the file could no longer access the file in certain ways. At least my interpretation of the reply is that they still think it is illegal to link to material that is publicly available on the Internet.
This is sad, everyone should ask them to not link to any external story on the Internet, and anyone that is linking to them on their websites should remove all links and isolate them.