Linking Questions

I own a website with many original PDF files for teachers. All of my PDF files are free - all a teacher has to do is go onto my site and click on what they want. No logging in or anything like that. My site has google adsense on the html pages to earn money.

My problem - Another website is charging schools and teachers $40 for a subscription. They call themselves an "education search engine" in the terms of service. They manually insert thousands of links to content created by others. They have over 1,100 direct links to different PDFs on my site.

So basically - they're charging people $40. They directly link to my PDF content. Users from this site never see my site, my ads, or anything - just the PDF.

Is it legal for him to charge users $40 for links to the free PDFs in my site (and others like it)?

Thanks in advance for any and all responses.

 

If it is legal or not will depend on your terms of service/ copyright on your website.

If they are hotlinking to your site's resources you could simply either block them so they get a 404 error or better, redirect them to your actual site so they can see your content (and ads) and still have the link to view the PDF

 

You need to make the PDF files accessible only to logged in users of your site, even if the registration for that is completely free, this will stop outside access to the same resources, and once logged in the user would be able to click any PDF file and get access. It's not illegal to link to stuff onother websites.

It's not difficult setting this sort of thing up, and once you have people registering, you can email them when a new resource becomes available, get more traffic to your site and thereby increase your adsense earnings anyway. And the guy linking to you will simply boost the number of email addresses you end up with on file.

 

Dont lightly switch to a registration model, whilst it will prevent these issues you may find that a lot of your current users arent interested in registrering and so stop visiting, that spiders cannot get to a lot of your content to index and that all of these inbound links, some of which may be giving you SEO advantages, are lost.

On the other hand, having more email addresses to market to etc may increase revenues above the loss caused by less visitors/ worse search engine rankings.

The quick fix is to do redirects but it is worth considering registration for the longer term

 

Thanks for your help everyone!!

 

The wisdom of requiring prospect downloaders to register first is the best thing to do. Besides, you are building your own list at the same time which is great for marketing.

 

Just integrate capcha or accounts to downalod books, no direct links.