Imagine I had some objection to a certain online bookseller, and had specifically, quite deliberately, avoided linking from, say, a book review on my site to the corresponding entry at that retailer’s site. If AutoLinks then linked to the retailer anyway, my site would be generating traffic and revenue for that company, directly against my will. Personally, I don’t regard that as acceptable.
Visitors to my site mightn’t agree with my objection to the bookseller, but the point is that it’s my website, and I’m not asking the visitor to agree. I wouldn’t be preventing the visitor from going to the retailer’s website via a different route, but I’d certainly object to my web content – my intellectual property, to get a little precious about it – being used to assist the process, without my permission.

I fully agree that the user needs there to be an ‘off’ button (and Google provide it – AutoLinks aren’t displayed unless specifically requested), but the content-provider needs an opt-out too, as Matt said.

You could restate the question as: “In the end, though, isn’t it bizarre that so many paranoid souls would campaign for government restrictions on what you can do with data that’s on your own DVD? Or TV? Or CD? Or TiVo? Or insert technology here?”

Seems like the Copyright Ã??Ã??ber Alles meme is highly contagious.

1. have an off button on the tool bar settings. this is the simplest solution to nearly any type of problem of this nature.

2. permit some sort of meta-tag on an HTML page that will permit content creators to disable this feature.

3. have some way to distinguish between the hyper-links that were “automatically” added from the ones that are in the original HTML.

three fairly simple steps that should negate any logical argument one can come up with. as i’ve said, i haven’t looked in detail at the function in question, maybe it already does this, if so this is just another example of a lot of noise for nothing.