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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?
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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
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"
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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.
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.
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
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...
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.