Danish Court Rules Deep Linking Illegal

Jstein writes "In a court ruling today Friday, the court in Copenhagen, Denmark ruled in favor of the Danish Newspaper Publisher's Association against the online news aggregator Newsbooster. Thereby deep linking has been ruled illegal for the first time." Currently the story is only in Danish (from Computerworld Denmark, Online). Update: 07/05 23:15 GMT by T : ttyp writes "Here is a link to an English language story about the Danish deep linking case."

Comments

Deep L:inking Defined

[grungebox]

Deep linking is when you link to an interior page. For example, Ticketmaster filed a lawsuit a while back (I think) against sites that linked users directly to interior pages to buy tickets for a specific show. Instead of going to www.ticketmaster.com and then searching for, say, Radiohead...a site that linked directly to the "Buy Radiohead tickets" page would be in violation.
This lawsuit is pretty deep.

Texas, and now Denmark

[User 956]

Wired News has a similar interesting article about a cease and desist letter sent to an independant news site by Belo, corporate parent of The Dallas Morning News, forbidding them from linking to individual stories within the site. They claim that the author can only link to the site's homepage, and attempting to link to stories within the site violates their copyright.

Clarification

[Penguin]

I was present at the court (yup, I'm a Dane) - and let me clarify the matter:

First of all, this is only the first part of the case, whether Newsbooster should be temporarily prohibited until the case is settled. Todays case wasn't settled by a judge, only a "bailiff" (according to my Danish/English translator :)

Second, the Danish Newspaper Publisher's Association weren't concerned about search engines like Google or just a few deep links. Newsbooster did a systematic index and furthermore sold services for update-information whenever your predefined search words matched any news article.

Third, the case is very specific and isn't as much about technical details as it is of legal matter. It was concluded that Newsbooster was in violation of Danish law of marketing ("good ethics", mainly concerning not gaining/harvesting of other companies products and services) and Danish law of intellectual property, since the articles at the Danish newspapers' sites were to be considered as a database, an index. Databases are also covered by the law of intellectual property (as a simple example: A name and an address wouldn't itself be protected by the law, but an index like a phone book would as a whole) - and since Newsbooster copied what would be considered as a database, the ruling was against Newsbooster.

Danish Newspaper Publisher's Association is obligated to present the case in court in less than two weeks. There wouldn't be created a precedent until that case is ruled.

..

And some personal comments: My hope was that Newsbooster wouldn't be prohibited, but the following meeting at FDIH (Foreningen for Dansk Internet Handel / The Danish eBusiness Association) mostly concerned techniques like robots.txt, usage of Referer and stuff like that.

I believe it's important to notice that the violation might have nothing to do with links, search engines and other tools, and as such the problem shouldn't be solved with technology.

Re:Clarification

[prizog]

"... as a simple example: A name and an address wouldn't itself be protected by the law, but an index like a phone book would as a whole."

Europe has the Database Directive, which grants certain sui generis rights to people who create collections of otherwise uncopyrightable information. These rights are analagous to copyright's restrictions on derivative works, called "extraction" in the database case, and on redistribution, called "re-utilization". These rights last for 15 years.

The UK and Australia simply grant copyrights to these collections.

The US doesn't have anything at all like this -- indeed, it's been explicitly ruled many times in the last decade that the constitution doesn't provide any authority to grant such rights. See Feist v. Rural Telephone Service for the specific phone book case, and ADC v. Hamilton for maps.

7am.com versus Nando Times

[NewtonsLaw]

Sometimes it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I consider myself to be one of the pioneers of news aggregation and linking -- having done this on a number of my own sites since 1995.

Back in 1998 I came into conflict with the Nando Times when my 7am.com news site over the use of their headlines and links on the syndicated Java news ticker and news-aggregation pages.

Nando tried to claim that use of its headlines and links to its pages were a breach of copyright and that anyone wishing to do this would have to pay $100/month for
the privilege.

I told them to go take a hike and they threatened to sue for breach of copyright. Suffice to say that once they checked with their legal department as to the validity of their claims they decided to back down.

Although they were one of the first news sites on the Web, Nando simply didn't get the concept that links drive traffic and traffic generates ad revenues -- or at least it did when there were advertisers willing to pay for placements.

The stupid thing about this whole situation was that the 7am.com News Ticker became so popular and drove so much traffic to the various sites included on it that if I decided to remove the links to a particular news site I'd often get an email complaining that I *wasn't* linking.

Around the same time I had similar problems with my Aardvark site and found myself battling a long list of local news publishers who threatened legal action if I continued to deep link to the stories they were carrying.

As with Nando, these sites eventually worked out that traffic = revenues and withdrew their stupid threats.

I should make it clear that I have a very ethical and honest linking policy which I advertise on my sites so that both the linkers and linkees know what I expect and offer. It's a shame that more sites don't do the same so as to avoid confusion and conflict.

I've been deep linking for some seven years, been threatened with law suits over my linking activities by much bigger publishers on no less than six occasions -- but never had to spend a day in court and never backed down.

Some people just take longer to learn that the WWW is *made* from deep links and that to disallow them will effectively destroy the fabric of the web.