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

I never really knew what deep linking meant...

[cca93014]

until now:

"Jeg er dybt chokeret. Vi taber på alle punkter, men det er sikkert, at vi kærer til Landsretten, siger han."

breakin the law

[iosphere]

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

Re:breakin the law

[Penguin]

Computerworld actually would like to intervene with Newsbooster, but wasn't allowed.

Furthermore, since the case is under private prosecution, Computerworld would have to run their own case against /. - and the case would be an entirely different. The arguments against Newsbooster wouldn't be relevant (if Computerworld would make a fuzz about it - but as mentioned, Computerworld supports Newsbooster in this case)

And let me emphasize: We don't have a final ruling yet.

Deep linking?

[User 956]

Too bad. Next week Time Magazine will require you to read pages 1-36 before reading the article you want on page 37.

Re:Deep linking?

[Oculus Habent]

Companies could prevent deep linking in a heartbeat just by redirecting anything that wasn't referred by their domain. That way people couldn't even send "deep links" to friends in e-mail...

It's a great way to have huge amounts of unaccessible information on a web page... Like phone trees, only more pathetic.

Re:Deep linking?

[CaseyB]

Companies could prevent deep linking in a heartbeat just by redirecting anything that wasn't referred by their domain.

I haven't been a webmaster in a while, but I think the spread of smart browsers and privacy firewalls that supress "extraneous" information like Referrer: headers would make this unadvisable.

Available Now at Denny's

[L. VeGas]

Danish Deep Links --

mmmm, breakfasty!

Deep linking implications

[SpatchMonkey]

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.

Re:Deep linking implications

[jhoffoss]

Given that technology can prevent deep linking, it is most efficient if the law is in accordance with that technological reality.

And if you want to allow people to deep link to your site? Is it then illegal to do so? I know it's an unreal example, but technology (knives, guns, blunt objects, whatever) can be utilized to injur, maim, murder, etc. someone...does that mean the law should also be in accordance with this technological reality?

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.

Re:Deep linking implications

[dirk]

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?

I am all for deep linking in most cases, and feel it should be legal. But I hate the idea that "there's a way to prevent it, so it shouldn't be ruled illegal." To me, that is the same as saying "There are ways to make your house burglar proof, so we shouldn't have to make breaking and entering illegal." Just because someone can prevent something from happening doesn't means they should have to prevent it. If we refuse to rule on things because there are ways to prevent it, what happens when those ways to prevent it are circumvented? Can we rule then? Or do we just wait for more ways to prevent the circumvention? I think deep linking is legal in most cases, but I want to see it remain legal because it is the right thing to do, not because there's a way to prevent it.

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.

Re:Deep L:inking Defined

[Monkeyman334]

Here's a post I made a couple months ago on the topic in response to a similar post, I think it's still valid:

Let me just quickly say, scripts like that is the stupidest abuse of referrers I've ever come across. The referrer is a great tool for following the flow of traffic, not to police flow of traffic. The referrer is set in the browser (client side), it is not something that any browser has to use. And it can be easily spoofed or disabled. If 10% of the websites blocked my traffic based on my referrer, I'd just find a browser that let me turn off the referrer. And I'm sure I'm not alone. So by abusing the referrer, it's more than possible for browsers to just stop sending it, and hurt websites that are trying to watch flow of traffic to help the users out.

Also Illegal:

[tswinzig]

- Sending specific URL's to your friends via email.

- Citing specific pages in your footnotes.

- Pointing at specific locations with your finger.

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.

Moronic.

[wirefarm]

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

New Meta Tag?

[randomErr]

Just a thought but how about a couple of new Meta Tags:

<meta http-equiv="LinkStatus" content="NoLink">
<meta http-equiv="LinkTo" content="False">

If the browser and search engine was setup properly they could read the tag and ignore the link(s) on the page or give a page is unavalible security zone warning.

I Corinthians 6:1
Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints?

Re:New Meta Tag?

[BlowCat]

Then I'll use an "improperly setup" browser. Software should be on the side of the users, or the users will choose other software.

Sensible in moderation

[Stuart Gibson]

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

this is absolutely bs

[lingqi]

in real-life terms, it would be the equivalent of:

"look for this and this information in THIS book" would be legal.

"look for this and this informaiton in THIS book, PAGE # xx-yy" would not be legal.

rediculous. -- heh, but it does make writing bibliographies easier -- "information obtained from www.nytimes.com"

Re:Hmmm.

[Fastolfe]

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.

Re:Sighs

[scott1853]

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.

deep linking or data mining?

[fermion]

While deep linking to individual pages within a web site is generally a good thing, what about data mining a site and displaying content as ones own? I would like to know if this ruling has more do wi'th deep linking or data mining.

For instance, we should be able to send a browser to any page 'within' a site, but what about aggregating information or links in a way the designer of the website never intended, or publishing the information in a new media. Is there much difference between data mining a web site and publishing public comments on a site such as /. in dead tree form? I certainly do not know, but it seems to be a relevant question.

There are clearly limits to deep linking. Jakob Nielson gives the example of a quiz on his site. Going to anywhere but the first page of the quiz renders the process meaningless. It is true that in most cases you want as much help as possible to get a user to an 'inner' page, as this appears to one of the greatest impediment to usability, but do we really want people to pull, for example, images or frames from our sites and display them as their own content. As the previous NPR discussion illustated, there are times when this will unfairly transfer hosting costs

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.

I am surprised-

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Being Danish myself, I am surprised by this ruling. 99.999% of the time the Danes are the ones with a clear head about all things.

Well, they *are* only human, perhaps this judge has some, ah, non-Danish lineage. This would explain this temporary lapse of judgement.

Precisely...

[Beautyon]

And thanks to the European arrest warrant, anyone anywhere can be arrested in Europe for remotely breaking the laws of one European state from another jurisdiction. Your local courts will have no power to stop you being transported and incarcerated in another country by foreign police.

This is not entirely new. Before this (1996) the Germans were able to raid an address in the Netherlands over the magazine Radikal. Read about it here.

The fact is that anywhere in Europe that absurd laws are passed, the practical effect now is that the law is simultaneously passed everywhere , for all people. This is A Bad Thing.

Re:Precisely...

[Beautyon]

No. Lets say someone from England broke a German law. The German police will issue an arrest warant in Berlin, and the English person will be arrested in London and transported to Germany, no questions asked.

There is nothing that a UK judge can do to stop this, there is no extradition review; this is the problem.

In France, you have to prove that you are innocent when you are accused of something; there is no notion of "innocent until proven guilty" under the French legal system.

The new pan European arrest warrant, and the EEC in general is eroding the notion of jurisdiction. This is terrible because Europeans have completely different notions of justice to each other.

All laws in the EEC are now a sickening hodge podge of the worst legislation of each country. The Lowest Common Denominator if you like.

No more search engines either

[DABANSHEE]

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.

Re:Hmmm.

[JamesOfTheDesert]

It's when you link to a second, third, fourth, etc level of a website.

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.

"'deep' linking" is a misleading term

[jdavidb]

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."

Don't even *use* the term "deep linking"

[marhar]

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... :-/

Re:Hmmm.

[ranulf]

I think you're confused as to what deep linking is

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.

This case is about indexing, not deep linking

[Lars Clausen]

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.

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 /., they did not put their own title on the references or anything.

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.

Summary available at Yahoo

[alanjstr]

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.

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.