On the MovieTickets.com “Link to Us” page, where they set the terms for who can link to them (seriously), among the terms is the following:
Any individual that wishes to [show the MovieTicket.com logo and link to the site] represents and warrants that the website in which the MovieTickets.com creative resides does not and will not include any advertisements or other material regarding or containing (i) cigarettes, (ii) hard liquor, (iii) massage parlors, (iv) abortion clinics, (v) firearms and ammunition, (vi) head shops, (vii) illegal (under federal, state, local, and foreign laws) lotteries, (viii) gambling (other than legal lotteries under federal, state, local, and foreign laws), (ix) sexually explicit content, or (x) content that denigrates a particular group based on gender, race, creed, religion, sexual preference or handicap. In addition, sites that are anti-Hollywood or anti-movies in general, sites that are owned or operated by a movie studio, sites offering Internet movie ticketing, and sites with copyrighted materials distributed in violation of copyright are prohibited from posting MovieTickets.com creative. (Emphasis mine.)
Most of those limitations make sense: they want to associate themselves with family-friendly sites. But including abortion clinics takes the definition of “family-friendly” to an unhealthy extreme, don’t you think?
An email is on its way to the PR folks over at MovieTickets.com. I’d like to see their reasons for including abortion clinics.
Of course, this brings up the whole idea of trying to control how and who can link to your site (they allow you to link only to one specific page of their site). It’s against the very nature—and shows a fundamental misunderstanding—of the Internet. Anyone should be able to link to any page of a website without worry and trying to prevent that is fruitless.
And since MovieTickets.com doesn’t appear to do anything technically (like using http rewrites) to enforce these terms, and it’s mentioned only on one page that’s linked from the bottom of their site in small type, they certainly can’t be that serious.
Let’s see what they say.