Does anyone know whether there are any legal restictions on quoting web-site urls in a published paper document?
Say i wanted to publish a book that held a series of rough guides to a certain subject, but each 'rough guide' also had a big list of urls after it so that people could do more in-depth research themselves. Do i need any kind of permission from the website authors to do this?
Okay, IANAL, but...
No, you don't need permission from a website author to cite their works any more than you need permission from the author of a book.
In fact the current MLA standards provide formats for including URLs as citations.
This is just one summary based on those standards, that popped up on a Google search: http://www.westwords.com/guffey/mla.html
But I wouldn't worry about date of retrieval if you're just giving pointers.
I.e., if you quote from a website, or use information on it to support a point you're making, then your footnote or bibliography needs to include the date you retrieved the information. I take this as a nod to the ephemeral nature of website publication, where text can change or disappear at a moment's notice.
But if you just want to say, "Look here, this is a good site," then I don't see that as necessary.
Here's a more comprehensive meta-guide to citing electronic sources: http://www.ifla.org/I/training/citation/citing.htm
After a little more web research...
The closest thing to needing permission is the unsettled area of linking to someone else's website, from your web page. You will find some discussion here (http://www.templetons.com/brad/linkright.html) and a list of cases here (http://www.jura.uni-tuebingen.de/bechtold/lcp.html).
However, if all you're doing is providing URLs in a print document...or even URLs which aren't actually clickable, I don't see how it can be seen as any different, legally, from citing a magazine article by page: magazines can't sue you for providing the information needed to bypass the table of contents and advertising.
Thanks mate. It's just a case of 'more information here' really. So i expect that just mentioning where to get it should be good enough. Sort of 'extra reading' bibliography really.
Cheers. :)