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Deep Linking Legal in Germany
BlueWonder writes "German news site Heise Online reports a recent decision of the Bundesgerichtshof, the highest court in Germany: Deep linking is not illegal.
Newspaper company Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt had sued the news search engine Paperboy for deep linking to their articles. According to the Bundesgerichtshof, the public interest in a well-working Internet takes precedence over the commercial interests of the newspaper company, even if the advertizing of the company is bypassed.
The Bundesgerichtshof has clarified that users can access any page if they know the URL, and deep linking is just a technical simplification for entering the URL manually. (Warning: links go to German sites - use the fish...)"
I've recently started using a news aggregator that takes RSS feeds from various sources and provides deep links straight to the article pages of their sites.
I find myself visiting pages on the Register, The Motley Fool, and loads of other websites that I would never have visited otherwise.
The publishers of these feeds know that, they know that it brings traffic and if they didn't want to do it they could pull the feed and prevent deep linking using any of various hacks.
It is up to them as a publisher to use deep linking to their advantage and stop being so anal about it.
...is that the rulin states that if the owner of a web site wants to prevent deep linking, it may feel free to use technical measures to prevent it. (That could be as simple as using the referrer= tag.) It goes on to state that circumventing technical measures designed to prevent deep-linking very well may be illegal (and that they'd rule on that if and when it comes up.)
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
In fact in some German states ISP are required to use censorship filters to filter content which is showing disrespect to human dignity like infamous rotten or neo nazi propaganda.
Indeed taking the new decision of congress to ensure free, uncensored internet access everywhere on the world, then you'll see very soon that Germany will be besides North Korea, China, Vietman, Iran and Lybia on the list of offenders.
Germany has a long list of incidents of restricting the peoples right to access information and entertainment by claiming to protect youth and society. So sales of Doom, Quake and Command and Conquer 3 are extremely restricted like hardcore bukkakke porn. Furthermore you can't get Hitler's "Main Kampf" or plans for explosives of weapons in stores.
This is a severe restriction of free information access. Free is free and information is information. That doesn't imply a qualitative measurement. So, in a truely free society people would have free access to images of severed head, torn inards and mindless racist propaganda, too.
I think that's a very bad direction for the German society. The public rights are slowly getting more and restricted. In this picture it fits that the limits for consumed alcohol before driving are steadly lowered, speed limits are spreading like salmonella, the weapon laws are more and more restricted and smoking is made illegal in more and more places.
Honestly, I don't know where this leads to. I'm just scared.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
This is the only sane argument about this. Laws or court cases against deep linking are moronic. It is a public network. You have advertised an address, and you knew what that meant when you did it.
You are not being co-erced into putting content on the network, and the consequences of putting up content are obvious to all.
Deep linking almost always generates only one hit/page impression/whatever you like to call it per user while a visitor that starts out on the homepage is likely to generate more than two clicks.
Remember, most sites use banner ads as a way to earn money and every hit means more money to them. Guess why so many news site just have a teaser of their articles on the homepage? Yes, to make you click on that link that provides you the full story and generates them another hit.
bye,
Settel
But that one click is one more click than they would have got.
The whole point is that deep linking drives somebody to your site that would never have come by were it not for that deep link - i.e. you do not have the opportunity to generate the 2 clicks that you talk about.
You have the opportunity on the end of that one click to capitalise on it and entice the visitor into the rest of your site.
Referrer authorization?
Learn to use the Internet. It's cheaper than learning to use the Courts.
Is it just me or are companies that discourage deep linking missing the whole point of the internet. Most web sites have severely limited and dumb search capabilities on their own or no search feature at all. Making me spend more than a minute searching on your website is just going to piss me off. The whole purpose of a website is for people to visit it and glean information from it. Preventing people from doing this is wasted capital. It's kinda like having 10 or 12 entrances to a shopping mall, but only allowing customers to use the main entrance.
If you have a robots.txt entry and somebody ignores it, then you should have a good case to sue them. If you don't have a robots.txt entry and somebody relies on it, you should have no case to sue.
Hopefully, the legal standard will be that when you choose a particular technolgy to disseminate your works, that the documents that define that technology become legally binding. In other words, the law should reinforce the technology.
The attitude of Handelsblatt unfortunately does not seem to be that unusual, at least not in Germany. I remember having to work with a large marketing and design agency on a web project (the small agency I was working for was doing the website, the other agency -- the biggest in our area -- did the print marketing and was trying to also lecture us on how to do the site).
First they criticized the fact that we had a full navigation on every page of the site -- in their view people should page through the site like a magazine.
Secondly they wanted to force people to start at the homepage and work from there.
They apparently thought of websites as being literally just a form of magazine or book -- you start at the beginning and page through to the end. I remember arguing with them vociferously that that was wrong, since it threw away all the advantages of the Web (I said it was akin to putting a radio ad on TV with no video) and also explained the principle of deep linking -- to which they reacted with horror and practically demanded we block deep linking, by lawsuits if necessary (WTF?).
Given that the client's site was for a major German utility company with loads of info for customers, deep linking made all the sense in the world -- much more so than many other sites (since news sites, etc. would link directly to pages with promotions and so on).
In the end we carried the day by arguing our position with the client's marketing director (who seemed to "get it" in general, even if he had some bizarre suggestions, like doing the entire ~1000-page site in Flash -- thank God we didn't do that).
OTOH that other agency was also pretty damned clueless about a lot of other things -- proof that large agencies often aren't large because of the quality of their work, but just because the PHBs have all the right connections. *sigh*
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
How can you get to know your enemy if you are not allowed to access their content?
How can adults keep the memory of the horror alive if they are not allowed to read it and discuss it and above all, use their critical thinking capabilities?
If someone tells me that something is "bad", I feel compelled to go and check by myself. If I am told that something is bad, but I am not allowed to validate that information, then I tend to grow suspicious.
While I wouldn't recommend that this book is allowed to any person younger than 18 without parental/ adult supervision, I would probably make it mandatory reading in every school (particularly in the last year of high school). I would make it a mandatory alert course on the evils of propaganda and the results of racism.
Informed adults make wiser and more matured decissions than people who are ruled by a baby sitter goverment.
It isnt all that great here in good old germany. Sometimes we are lucky and have a judge who knows the matter.
But on the other hand, software patents are going to come etc.
There is still enough to be done here.
The BGH is the highest court in Civil matters. It is the end of any legal argument in civil matters.
There is also the BVerfG, which is the court, who decides about Constitutional and basic rights issues with final authority. But unless the Handelsgruppe can show that the current judgement by the BGH violated their constitutional rights in a serious way, the BVerfG will never have to decide this case.
The American Supreme Court is a combination of the two. Remember the US Constitution was one of the first real constitutions, so the power to decide Constitutional cases was just put in the hands of the highest normal court.
Moritz