Imagine linking to a company's website when referencing them in an article and having that company demand you remove the link because of copyright concerns. Or worse, the company threatens to sue you because they say the link from your website resulted in "material financial loses [sic] to the company."
[ ... ]
Although, the pretense for the threat was a copyright claim, the company explained that the outgoing link from the blog hurt the company "due to search engine penalties resulting from the links originating under your control."
Google's most recent Panda update is said to punish "over-SEO'd" websites. In other words, websites with too many links originating from weak or spammy websites will be penalized by Google.
However, BigPinkCookie is the furthest thing from a spammy website. It's a personal blog with an impressive Google PageRank 5, which means Google has deemed its content quite valuable, and links from that type of blog are typically very desirable for search engine optimization purposes.
[ ... ]
This case displays the insane level that some companies will go to in claiming that unwanted links to their website represents intellectual property "problems". But, disturbingly, some authorities agree with this concept. Last year the Department of Homeland Security preemptively seized websites merely for linking to copyrighted material.
More...
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Company Threatened Blogger to Remove Their Link, Claiming it Caused "material financial losses"
NSA whistle blowers warn that the US government can use surveillance to 'see into your life'
National Security Agency whistle blowers Thomas Drake, former senior official; Kirk Wiebe, former senior analyst; and William Binney, former technical director, talk to "Viewpoint" host Eliot Spitzer about their allegations that the NSA has conducted illegal domestic surveillance. All three men are providing evidence in a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the NSA.
See:
Spooky: How NSA’s Surveillance Algorithms See Into Your Life
Tom Robbins Mobile
This 36-minute mobile movie is with novelist Tom Robbins. Robbins was named by Writer's Digest as one of the "Top 100 Writers of the 20th Century," and has been recognized with numerous awards, including his honor in 2001 as Willamette Writers' Distinguished Northwest Writer.
See also:
The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins
Cultural institutions by and large share one primary objective: herd control. Even when ostensibly benign, their propensity for manipulation, compartmentalization, standardization and suppression of potentially disruptive behavior or ideas, has served to freeze the evolution of consciousness practically in its tracks. In technological development, in production of material goods and creature comforts, we've challenged the very gods, but psychologically, emotionally, we're scarcely more than chimpanzees with bulldozers, baboons with big bombs.
Pakistan’s ‘sevadar’: Deputy attorney-general polishes shoes in India
When he’s not performing his official duties as part of a visiting delegation in India, Deputy attorney-general Muhammad Khurshid Khan chooses to clean shoes at places of worship as “penance for crimes committed by the Taliban”.
Khan, 62, is to clean the shoes of thousands of devotees at India’s Golden Temple in Amritsar in “penance” for the beheading of a Sikh by the Taliban in Peshawar two years ago, reported The Telegraph.
After spending several hours polishing the shoes of worshippers at Gurdwara Sisganj in New Delhi on Monday, where he was part of a Pakistan Supreme Court Bar Association delegation, Khan left for Amritsar to clean thousands more.
More...
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
