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Danish Court Rules Deep Linking Illegal

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the link-this dept.

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."

3 of 374 comments (clear)

  1. breakin the law by iosphere · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Aren't you in violation of Danish law by linking to the story?

  2. Deep linking implications by SpatchMonkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Summary available at Yahoo by alanjstr · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Read a summary here. The real issue was that the company doing the deep linking was deemed to be in direct competition with the site it was linking to.
    Copenhagen's lower bailiff's court ruled Friday that Newsbooster.com was in direct competition with the newspapers and that the links it provided to specific news articles damaged the value of the newspapers' advertisements.