Linking to 3rd party websites - is permission required?

Travel Weekly have this week a rather shocking quote stated by Debbie Venn from asb law, a southern UK based legal firm who have a fairly long list of travel company clients.

The article states :

“…and she warned that, when adding links to other websites, permission from the third party must be granted in writing, in order to guarantee you have protection from any future legal action”

I am not a lawyer (of course!) and I have no idea about the law actually says with respect to 3rd party website links - but surely this isn’t right. I should be able to link to whichever site I want to. The web is built on links.

Overall, I think this quote is rather unsatisfactory from Travel Weekly - and leaves us crying out for more detail. For example, who is going to commence legal action? Are we talking about the website visitor who may perceive that through a link that there is some kind of inherent responsibility in what is found on the resulting website. If this were the case, then I would say follow the BBC website’s advice - and put next to all external links - “We are not responsible for the content of external internet sites”. I am sure the BBC have good lawyers who have looked into this and if this disclaimer is good enough for them, it is good enough for you.

Perhaps legal action will come from ABTA, the Travel Association (or whatever name they have this week) - in that maybe links to other travel product websites may give the impression that in some way financial protection on one travel website (provided by ABTA or ATOL) should give coverage to linked travel websites. Maybe that is the problem.

Perhaps legal action will come from the website being linked to - I suggest this is very unlikely. Most websites are trying to get links - not remove them! They may not want a link if what is being written is not positive about the company - but this surely falls under a different legal area - and has nothing to do with the link - more about the text surrounding the link.

Personally, where links are concerned, I am much more interested in the legal moves around deeplinking. See this summary of some news relating to this on the Out-Law.com website

Incidentally, I didn’t ask permission from asb law to link to their website - should I have done?  

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