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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."
Too bad. Next week Time Magazine will require you to read pages 1-36 before reading the article you want on page 37.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
- Sending specific URL's to your friends via email.
- Citing specific pages in your footnotes.
- Pointing at specific locations with your finger.
"And like that
If you put a document on the web and make it accessible through the use of a(n) URL, anyone can use that URL to access it.
Of course you can use referrer technology to block how people get to your document, but these people seem to lack the ability to do things like that.
What if I bookmark a 'deep link'? What about Google?
Personally, I think that the term "deep link" is a misleading term - each document is equally accessible from outside, well except for a few bytes in the length of the URL.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Let's hope that this doesn't mean that deep linking in itself becomes illegal. There may be a case where advertising revenue pages are bypassed or some other legitimate reason exists that the content publisher would rather users came via their front page.
However, it is well known that deep linking is good linking as far as users go.
I don't suppose there's any chance that publishers will come to a gentleman's agreement that it is improper to deep link if they explicitly ask not too (in the same way as it is considered "impolite" to provide direct links to files on others servers.
Finally, if DeCSS code can be considered "free speech", how can writing an URL not be subject to the same rational?
Goblin
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
I disagree. If you're sticking something up on a web site, that something has a URL. Every entity on a web site has its own unique URL that should be retrievable anywhere.
If you don't like this behavior, and you want "pages" on your site to only be accessible by people browsing through your site, you're going to need to stick a "document retrieval" application layer onto your site. Users start a session when they enter this application, and are only able to retrieve stories through this application front-end. This can be done through HTTP as simply as with a session ID, but the web was not meant to work like this.
Again, we have a rather useful technology being twisted and warped by corporate interests instead of those corporate interests funding a proper technological solution, just like the intellectual property crap associated with DNS nowadays.
What's a "level"? If there is a specific, direct URL to a item, then it is already at the "top" level. That there are other ways to arrive at that URL is a conceptual design decsion, not a feature of hyperlinking or the Web itself. There is no "top" of a web site, other than mental contructs people impose on it, unless the web server enforces a particular sequence of URLs.
What's (almost) funny is that this is trivially easy to do, and just has to be cheaper than suing people, unless you are collecting damges each time.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
The reason "deep" linking should not be illegal is because there is no fundamental difference between a deep link and a regular link. We should quit playing the game by using this term to distinguish "deep" links from others.
You can't come up with a clear, unambiguous definition of deep links without having a special database or extension to the DNS database (!) to indicate what a site considers to be deep links on a case-by-case basis. In otherwords, the only clear and concise definition of a "deep" link is "a page on the website of Somebody Powerful that that Somebody doesn't want me to link to."
You can't just say, "A deep link is a link that goes somewhere besides the top of a site." For example, this is a deep link (to a website that has tried to force people not to link to them, I might add), while this is not. Both are links to something other than just ahost.domain.com, but the second is the top page of a site.
The real problem is web newbies (big media companies) think every website should have one entry point, but the web wasn't designed that way. We should quit helping these people persist in their misunderstanding of reality by using the term "deep link."
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The web has links, period. The term "deep link" was created by individuals who fundamentally don't understand the nature of the web. Using their terminology makes it much easier for them to stay on the offensive.
:-/
Sorry to sound so RM-esque, but sometimes the words really *do* matter...
If the technology to prevent deep-linking is present, and a web-site that wishes to prevent deep-linking does not utilize (or attempt to utilize) this existing technology, they shouldn't be able to complain if someone deep-links to their site, IMNSHO.
Note that I am making two assumptions: implementing anti-deep-linking technology does not require the time or resources it would take to build a wall around 10 acres; the second is that you are just as able to give permission to deep-link as you are able to give permission for someone to murder you.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Having read several of the actual documents involved in this case, let me say this: This case is not about deep linking at all. In no way. Whatsoever.
/., they did not put their own title on the references or anything.
What they're being sued over is having essentially copied the table-of-contents. They've taken the links and titles of all the newspaper articles directly from the webpage and presented them to users. Unlike
Under Danish copyright law, an index can be copyrighted. This copyright was violated.
This case sets no precedent for a site that collects links to articles about e.g. Linux, as such a site would have to put their own effort into making the index.
Everybody, STOP FSCKING PANICKING!
Thank you.