Better Business Bureau Gets Stupid

from the you-want-what-now? dept

Thu, Mar 15th 2001 1:03am — Mike Masnick

Thanks to Geekpress for finding this one. The Better Business Bureau, in a moment of what can only be described as pure stupidity, has decided that no one can link to their website any more since there's copyrighted material on it. So, basically, they're saying the whole concept of the web is illegal. Anyway, here's a message for the folks at the Better Business Burea: if you don't want people to link to your website - don't have one. Of course, if you have a complaint about how the Better Business Bureau is doing business - who do you complain to?

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

4 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Col. Klink (profile), 15 Mar 2001 @ 7:30am

robots.txt
Geez, what morons. They didn't even bother to set up a robots.txt to keep the search engines out.
I mean, everything is born copyrighted, so by their stance, no site can link *anywhere*.
They're also hypocrites. How else could you explain a page like http://www.bbb.org/outside/company.asp?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Stephen Kellett, 15 Mar 2001 @ 9:13am
  
  Re: robots.txt
  Quite,
  
  I guessed their URL and visited their site.
  Full of links to other corporations. Plus the
  names of the major corps like Intel and Microsoft,
  all of which have a seat on the board of BBB. You
  think they'd know better.
  
  Just incredible.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Col. Klink (profile), 15 Mar 2001 @ 2:57pm

Mega-hypocrisy
Just found that the BBB has a site with links to companies that "do not have our permission to use BBB trademarks and have refused to comply with repeated requests to stop using them".
What I find so ironic is that they provide links to some of those sites. But by their own logic, they should not be ALLOWED to use the trademarked names of these companies or link to their copyrighted web sites.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Bryan Fletcher, 24 Jan 2009 @ 6:36pm

Better Business Crap
I dealt with the Better Business Bureau for years.
Here it is in a nutshell.

they are the most greedy and corrupt organization in America
and Canada too.

they never had the business or the consumer at heart ever
read these links.

http://dockets.justia.com/docket/court-nysdce/case_no-1:2008cv06572/case_id-329823/

htt p://www.canlaw.com/caveat/bbb.htm

these are just a few of the examples of the SACRED BBB
[ link to this | view in chronology ]