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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."
Aren't you in violation of Danish law by linking to the story?
Just because one instance of deep linking has been ruled illegal, doesn't mean all instances are illegal. There will have been specifics to the case that causing the ruling to made. Unfortunately, as the article is in Danish, I don't know what they are.
There are technological ways around deep linking, of course. Checking the Referer header in an HTTP request is one option, and dynamically creating unique URIs on the pages you allow people to visit from is another.
It would be nice if technology was used to prevent this rather than court rulings, but hey, what can you do?
Anyway it's only been ruled in Denmark, so the effect on the Internet as a whole is negligible.
Personally I'd stop going to a site that did that. Especially a news site that changes it's content every day. If I was a day late I'd have to dig around and find what section it should be in and then what date it was on. It would be like trying to find an article from last week on ZDNet.
On the other hand, I probably would never find out about that site because nobody would link to them.
Also, in order to enforce the ruling they're probably going to have to implement that referrer check on the server anyways, which somebody could easily fake the referrer if they really wanted to get around it.
While Denmark may seem a good distance away from many of us, the Hague Convention may hold all of us responsible for the silly laws one country imposes. Unfortunate indeed, because it may mean no deep-linking for us and the DMCA for the rest of you, and it seems like a rather convenient but nasty way of sidestepping the controversy surrounding each piece of legislation like this by simply allowing it to take effect without any discussion.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Afterall arn't the vast majority of search engine results deep links.
This comes down to the fact that web advertising doesn't work. Unlike telly there's none of this having to watch adds to watch the program crap.
Really deeplinking to advertisers I spose is like being able to instantly fast foreward to the actionshots in a movie that some network's broadcasting.
When will these news sites learn that they're going to have to pr0n up their sites if they want to make money from them.
Doh! I think I'm a dumbass! I was still thinking about the Deutsche Bahn case... I'll excuse my self for not reading the article though :-)
If that's really what the deal is, then frankly they shouldn't be so stupid. There are easy technical solutions to stop people deep-linking in the way you suggest, such as checking the "Referrer" header and redirecting to an index page or some other page that encloses the page in a frame, etc, if you've come from outside the site. I don't see the need for courts to be involved, when there's a perfectly good technical solution.