You May Not Link This Web Site

Ganon34 sent us a funny story about a company requiring permission to link their website. The company in question is KPMG, a financial and legal advisory company, and the article itself is an entertaining read about the aftermath of them sending demands that someone remove a link to their public web site. It's a pretty funny piece -- especially the part about KPMG's theme song. Also references the old ticketmaster vs ticet.com case that held up deep linking. It's all funny 'cuz its true. Their page could also use some testing since it doesn't render in my browser.

Ugly Flash

That is one horrible flash intro at KPMG [kpmg.com]. No wonder they want people to get permission [kpmg.com] to link [kpmg.com] to it.

Re:Ugly Flash

Jesus...KPMG has really won haven't they. With one stupid letter they managed to get more free advertising and even active links than X10 has purchased during its entire lifetime. Given the way modern search enginges work this probably boosts it up to the top of the heap in search results as well.

Re:Ugly Flash

I, too, was somehwhat uncertain of KPMG's purpose.

But after hearing their theme song [akamai.net] (mp3 from the wired article) I understand. "KPMG/We're strong as can be/A dream of power and energy/We go for the goal/Together we hold/On to our vision of global strategy..."

Re:Ugly Flash

I don't know if the "any publicity is good publicity" rule holds for consulting firms. It's a bad thing to get a reputation as a company that Doesn't Get It, when your whole business is based on the perception that you Get It.

Re:Ugly Flash

KPMG is one of the Big Five accounting firms; just about anyone who would need their services already knows they exist. I think this just makes them look kind of dumb...

Ooops

I just broke their policy [kpmg.com].

Oops [kpmg.com] I [kpmg.com] did [kpmg.com] it [kpmg.com] again! [kpmg.com]

Damnit! [kpmg.com]

Re:Ooops

Man. These guys are silly.

The worst part is, I had a job interview with them earlier today.

I think it went quite well.

so /. links to it?

Just seemed ironic that /. linked to a site in order to break the news that a site prohibits linking to it.

Re:so /. links to it?

As did the WIRED story [wired.com].

My question is search engines. Does KPMG expect every search engine to "execute an agreement" in order to include: [kpmg.com] results in their database and subsequently provide the results to their users?

It seems that if, [kpmg.com] is actually intent on enforcing this policy, then they should require a userid and password to access every page, and then only provide the passwords to websites that have "executed" agreements. Personally, it looks to me like () [kpmg.com] is doing a good job of executing themeselves.

BTW, if you would like to know more about , [kpmg.com] take a look at the excellent front page story the Washington Post did yesterday on How the Big 5 CPA Firms let their clients get away with multi-million dollar mistatements on their financial data [washingtonpost.com] resulting in masses losses for investors in those companies including many people whose pensions have been squandered. Here is what they have to say about KPMG:

Rite Aid [amazon.com] shareholders alleged that consulting fees figured in KPMG's relationship with the drugstore chain, according to their class-action lawsuit against the accounting firm.

Rite Aid [amazon.com] acknowledged last year that it had overstated earnings by more than $1 billion over two years. Audit fees were less than 20 percent of what Rite Aid [amazon.com] paid KPMG over a 2 1/2-year period in the late 1990s, the suit alleged.

At one point, the suit alleged, Rite Aid's then-chairman, Martin L. Grass, awarded KPMG consulting engagements worth more than $1.5 million "as a sweetener and to ensure the accounting firm's continued cooperation."

An attorney for Grass said the allegations were "wrong" and "grossly unfair." KPMG was given a contract to address weaknesses in Rite Aid's [amazon.com] inventory-tracking system, not to ensure cooperation, lawyer Andrew Weissman said.

KPMG said that it was "victimized by company management" and that the consulting it did for Rite Aid [amazon.com] was "insignificant to the overall professional relationship."

jez

If they don't want people linking to their website, just block all referrers. Mind you, it might be a bit difficult to get to their website, but rules are rules!

Re:jez

...just block all referrers...

In order to do that, they'd have to be competent web developers/admins.

However, they are ... consultants [unitedmedia.com].

Freedom of the Press

Wouldn't this be like hindering freedom of the press or something? That's like saying, "If you use our name in daily conversation, we'll sue you." Its almost as bad as companies trying to sue people because they give their products a bad review.

Re:Freedom of the Press

Errr... you seem to have hit upon an interesting conumdrum - is this like limiting freedom of the press or limiting free speech? I'm not sure if the two are actually separate or inexorably linked, but there is a difference.

When you publish a web page, should you be able to say that you are a member of the "Press" and afforded the same privileges, or do you get just plain old free speech rights (such as they are)?

Probrably not an earth shaking issue, but it may make any legal arguments interesting...

Soko

Big deal..its a request

Okay... so here's what I don't get... the company's policy clearly says "KPMG is obligated to protect its reputation and trademarks and KPMG reserves the right to request removal of any link to our website."

So what do they think? EVERYONE that they request to remove a link is going too. If they want to try to use this stupid policy to "enforce" something (what, I'm still not quite sure) then at least word it properly. In the form of "we request the right to force you to remove a link to our site." Not that either policy actually means anything.

I reserve the right to request you to remove any silver type jewerly while visitng my website.

Re:Big deal..its a request

Here's a link [kpmg.com] to their actual disclaimer page. By posting this, I'm violating both their "no linking without permission" policy and their "no links that bypass the homepage" policy.

If they really cared, couldn't they just block all pages but their index for all browsers who don't send a referer header indicating they came from another page on their site? If you're going to make up stupid rules, you might as well enforce them when it's that easy to do.

I also demand

that you ask permission before sending email to my inbox - or I'll sue!

Suprise, suprise

What do you expect from a company that hires people based on GPA and status of college? All of the major consulting companies, Bain, McKinsey, PWC, et al, they won't even interview you if your SAT scores, GPA, and College aren't "top notch." It is pretty sad, as if this is really a measurement of ability. These companies don't like anyone to be individual or think outside the box and it shows in their draconian policies.

--Jon

Re:Suprise, suprise

A high GPA after all, is a measure of dedication and perseverance.

Right... A high karma on Slashdot after all, is a measure of dedication and perseverance.

I Call Troll

This is a brilliant bit of viral marketing. Never heard of them 3 days ago and now they've been on FCompany [fuckedcompany.com] and Slashdot. They are number 2 on the blogdex [mit.edu].

Re:Hehe. Marketing people get more inventive.....

While the average Joe on the street may not know who they are, I can assure you that every corporate executive worth anything knows who they are (as a matter of fact, many high-ranking corporate executives worked for one of these firms at one time or another). KPMG is a powerhouse consulting firm, up there with McKinsey, Cap Gemini, Accenture, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Arthur Andersen, etc. They make billions in revenue and have thousands of employees.

Most people haven't heard of firms like this because it does them no good to market to the average consumer since their services are of no interest to them. Large corporations pay them millions however, and you can pretty much bet that just about every Fortune 500 firm is one of their clients. A mid-level consultant in one of these firms bills out at about $300-$400 per hour. They make huge sums of money and wield tremendous power in corporate America.

Re:Hehe. Marketing people get more inventive.....

Andersen Consulting was part of Arthur Andersen until the beginning of this year. Andersen Consulting filed suit to split completely from Arthur Andersen for a number of reasons, and as part of the settlement, Andersen Consulting lost the right to use the Andersen name. "Accenture" was chosen as the result of a contest within the firm to name the newly independent company. Accenture recently IPO'd and has been doing pretty well on the market. They have approximately 75,000 employes (twice the size of Microsoft) and revenue of over 11 billion last year.

Opinion Piece

Boy, is KPMG [kmpg.com]'s theme song lame.

If my boss gave me the choice between singing that song and sodomizing myself with a baseball bat dipped in a paste of ground glass and 5-minute epoxy, I'd ask him for a map to the nearest Home Depot.

At the recording studio ...

KPMG Morale and Puffery Manager - Alright, guys, that sounds really positive and great, we'll send you the check in the mail.

(leaves, whistling that godawful song)

Producer - Man, I'm glad that's over.

Studio musicians - Yeah, man. Dig it. Lame gig.

Studio owner - I've been listening to these backwards ...

Producer - Well, I ...

Studio owner - You've got Price Waterhouse's human resources department's number backward masked on the first verse. I hope they don't find out ...

Producer - I couldn't resist. Hours and hours of listening to that damn song! I'm only human, damn it!

A clever ploy, KPMG

Clearly this is just a clever ploy to get tons of people to link to them. Look how many people have taken the bait so far!

If Current Trends Continue(tm), it's only a matter of time before they're at the top of the results for every google search.

Re:A clever ploy, KPMG

You're just saying that to to try to get me to have reverse psychology work on me.

Reverse Psychology?

I read this earlier today in Wired and had to wonder if this wasn't all a means of advertising through reverse psychology. Tell some geeks they can't do something that obviously anyone can do and they will do exactly the opposite.

And in the process this company gets a huge number of free links from just about everywhere. How many companies would not like to have their website linked everywhere?

Re:Lyrics

This was painful to transcribe: mostly because I'm at work and trying to not burst out laughing:

KPMG:
We're strong as can be
A dream of power and energy
We go for the goal
Together we hold on to
Our vision of global strategy

We create
We elevate
We pass the ones that are la-ey-ate
A global shield
This is our dream of success
That we create

We'll be number one
#Whenever that comes?# [hard to make out]
Together each of us will run for gold
That shines like the sun in our eyes

Chorus [1st stanza]

The time is now
To lead the way
We share the same idea that may
Win by the end of the day
A friend that's here to stay

Identity
One energy
One strategy
With sypathy
These are the words
That can lead us to a new world

Chorus
Chorus
key-changed chorus
key-changed chorus a'la Gospel

Thought experiments

Thought experiments for my web hypothetical kpmgsucks.com web site (someone owns it already):

- A link to KPMG that displays only if you're coming in from a kpmg.com [kpmg.com] (oops!) address. (I'd love to hear the conversation between KPMG and its outside corporate counsel on that one.)

- A link to KPMG that shows up on 0.1% of all page views, randomly.

- A GIF that looks like a blue, underlined link to kpmg.com [kpmg.com] (oops!)

I wonder...

if they have written agreements with Google, Altavista, and the other search engines. If not, perhaps their name should be removed from the engine.

Same with the phone books...

Re:I wonder...

if they have written agreements with Google, Altavista, and the other search engines. If not, perhaps their name should be removed from the engine.


Actually, they don't have to. They DO have a robots.txt file. And in light of the current theme of this article, its rather amusing. :)

# everyone go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

-Restil

Re:I wonder...

Google is doing what they're supposed to. Note that Google doesn't actually contain any quotes from their website, nor do they have a cached page.

However, Google still has kpmg.com in their database, probably because of other sites that link to it.

Slippery Slope

This will not be a laughing matter in five years. The 2600 DeCSS linking case ruled it is illegal to even link to illegal sites. It's only a matter of time before KPMG's attitudes become de facto.

[begin obligatory slashdot rant] This is truly a bizarre turn of evens as this ruling raises some fundamental questions about intellectual property rights and free speech on the Internet. You would think it is legal to link to a page against the author's permission. You would also think the likes of Madonna and Julia Roberts couldn't steal registered domains containing their names. All of these have been called into doubt as we descend down this slippery slope.

The corporate chokehold on individual freedoms needs greater vigilance. If you asked someone twenty years ago what they thought of random drug testing, stealth eavesdropping techniques, etc., you would probably get a much more appalled response than you would today. What are we in danger of not being appalled about twenty years from now?

More sites [dmoz.org] on this topic, esp. 46-49 of this ruling [uscourts.gov].

Illegal hyperlink

I wonder if http://www.kpmg.com/?#define%20m(i)(x[i]^s[i+84])y )c+=y=i^i/8^i>>4^i>>12,i=i>>8^y& gt;14,y=a^a*8^a>8^y/n."[k>>4]*2^k*257/8,s [j]=k^(k&k*2&34)*6^c+~y;}} would be an illegal hyperlink... Yep, that's DeCSS...

Re:Illegal hyperlink

Maybe not, but if you hit that url... then they have DeCSS in their web server's log file! CALL THE MPAA!!!

I wonder

are they going to go after google [google.com] ?

I bet they even submitted the link themselves ...

IANAL but...

please be aware such links require that a formal Agreement exist between our two parties, as mandated by our organization's Web Link Policy."

So its their policy, so what? It's not a contract, what binds anyone to abide by it? They can't do anything about it if he links to them, not to mention the free speech implications. This was just a lame attempt to shut off some bad press and ironically they're getting tons of attention for doing it. Perhaps that affect is the intention.

HEY!!! I hosted their first web site!!!

And sat at a desk across from the guy who did their first website! Hehehhehe... That's amusing as all get out. They invested in Florida Internet Corporation, and we handled all of their internet needs early on (1995ish). They wanted to have every TLD for themselves, including all the country codes and .edu and such. It took forever to convince them that that wasn't possible in many cases. The son of the (owner, CEO?), visited all the time, and went to strip clubs every night (The Landing Strip was a favorite, I remember), and rode his motorcycle all over town. I can easily see them doing this.

Pure arrogance.

--
Evan

So what's the problem?

Don't want people linking to your site? Fine. Then don't let them. When the webserver gets an HTTP GET request, check the referrer address. If its not coming from a "proper" link, then simply refuse to serve the page. No need to fuss about improper links. They simply won't work. And you'll be MORE than capable of keeping all those potential customers OFF your website. Who really wants customers anyways? All they do is provide you with more work to do. :)

-Restil

KPMG theme

As the articles points out, KPMG has only gotten themselves into this embarrassing situation because they were unhappy about people making fun of another embarrassing situation: The KPMG Theme Song! It explains their power, strength, and global strategy (which must include really bad music).

(heres the akamai link to the mp3 [akamai.net])

KPMG/KPMG Consulting craziness

I work at KPMG Consulting; there really is a bizarre lifestyle here. I do LOVE the theme song. It was available on one of our international intranet sites; one of the more hip netherlandic teams had it commissioned as part of their morale-building exercises.

It worked, actually; everyone in the company has laughed about that for the past year. I guess it was only a matter of time before we got publicly ridiculed because of it. I wonder if it was leaked for publicity? Hmmmmm...

LMAO, The Slashdot Effect!

/.ed! /.ed! /.ed!

KPMG: Please do not link to our website.

HAH! I wonder if CmdrTaco is going to recieve a cease & desist letter? Watch yo bad self, Rob!
Seriously, the irony here is just to much. How does it affect them in any way except more traffic for their site == more exposure + more banner ad revenue. And unless someone is using KPMG's equipment to host that link, they don't have to agree to jack shit. I propose a new theme song:

K-P-M-G!
We're out of touch with reality!
We have a website we don't want you to see.
If you link to us we're gonna break your knees!
It's all a part of our global stradegy...

Slashdot Theme Song!

Hey, whats the Slashdot theme song?

According to Google...

...there are 2,800 sites [google.com] that link to www.kpmg.com [kpmg.com].

Jeez. That's a lot of contracts...

KPMG - the remixes!

Better yet, KPMG theme song remixes!
the jungle remix [phrenetic.org]
the hard-rock remix [dolanbrau.com]
There's also a teutonic remix out there somewhere, somebody want to provide a link?

How many other's have this same policy?!?!?

My employer's Head WebMaster recently released the newly revised web policy manual that all of the various department webmonkeys have to abide by.

In that manual under the section titled "Linking Policy" is this paragraph:

Links may be made to the City of Virginia Beach Web site with the express written (hard copy or email) permission of the City Webmaster. Persons wishing to link to the City Web site may contact the City Webmaster for permission and linking procedures. When permission is received to link to the City's Web site, all hypertext links should be pointed to the City's homepage, http://VBgov.com.

I haven't yet inquired as to exactly what the intent of such an absurd statement is or how that would be enforced or how the world at large would even be aware of a policy that is (AFAIK)only referenced in a purely internal document posted on our intranet.

Just how many companies have such silly policies?

Perhaps I'll start "linkriot.com" whose sole purpose is to collect the URL's of and link to the sites of such misguided entities.

Lynx renders it just fine

lynx -useragent='Mozilla/4.0 (lynx; faked; hahahaha)' http://www.kpmg.com/


After accepting or rejecting the five cookies they offer (one for the initial connection, one for having seen the flash, one for a session id, and some others for who knows what), the page appears, and looks like it was written especially for Lynx! All the images have alt tags, the text formats nicely, it's easy to read..

So now what was all that .asp redirection/browser-detection/eat-my-cookie BS for in the first place? When it comes down to it, they have a perfectly useable and readable site if they'd just dump all the fancy crap (which Lynx does for you quite nicely).

How it renders in Mozilla

If you're an IE user and want to see how other browsers manage kpmg.com:

How kpmg.com renders in Mozilla [cellar.org]

They can enforce their policy

If KPMG [kpmg.com] can enforce their policy [kpmg.com] easily enough by simply not delivering content when the HTTP request comes in asking for their site [kpmg.com]. They [kpmg.com] say they are "e-business savvy", so they [kpmg.com] should have no trouble setting this up in just a few minutes.

The web is about linking. That's why they call it "The Web". If KPMG [kpmg.com] doesn't want to join in, then they [kpmg.com] should just stay out. And there are many ways to do that, including still having a site [kpmg.com] served by HTTP to send content to whoever types their name [kpmg.com] in manually, or links [kpmg.com] from sites they [kpmg.com] approve [kpmg.com] of. They [kpmg.com] should just do it and prove their competence in running their site [kpmg.com] their way [kpmg.com].

But why the hell would I want to link to their site [kpmg.com] anyway. It sucks! The whole damn thing is a morass of lame Javascript. They [kpmg.com] can't even put plain HTML in and have to have Javascript generate it. It's clear to me that they [kpmg.com] don't know how to do things on the server side.

Reminds me of Spinal Tap...

"And this one (guitar) I've never played. See--it's still got the tags on it"
"Wow, that's something..."
"Don't touch it!"
"I wasn't going to touch it."
"Well don't touch it. Nobody must touch this guitar. In fact, don't even look at it. Turn around."

Sorry. Flashbacks.

Did he even violate KPMG's policy?

According to KPMG's disclaimer page [kpmg.com]:

Third Party Links are provided as a convenience to our users. KPMG does not control and is not responsible for any of these sites or their content. KPMG is obligated to protect its reputation and trademarks and KPMG reserves the right to

request [emphasis mine] removal of any link to our website.

Explicit permission is required to use the KPMG logo. To request this written approval, contact the Webmaster or send an e-mail under "Contact Us." The following web link activities are explicitly prohibited by KPMG and may present trademark and copyright infringement issues:

• Links that involve unauthorized use of our logo
• Framing, inline links or metatags
• Hyperlinks or a form of link that disguises the URL and bypass the homepage

It sounds like harassing this guy with lawyers is beyond what they say they'll do.

Silly company.

--Ben

Their disclaimer and Robots.txt

Their disclaimer http://www.kpmg.com/disclaimer.html [kpmg.com] says "Based on the fundamental universal condition of the electronic communication process, KPMG does not guarantee or warrant the Site will be uninterrupted". Can anyone say /. effect?

I really love their http://www.kpmg.com/robots.txt [kpmg.com]. it says:
# everyone go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

-

What Tim Berners-Lee has to say about this:

We cannot regard anyone as having the "right not to be referred to" without completely pulling the rug out from under free speech. [w3.org]

Frankly, if KPMG doesn't want to be linked to, they should not be on the web.