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Danish Court Rules Deep Linking Illegal
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Fri Jul 05, 2002 11:31 AM
from the link-this dept.
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."
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Danish Court Rules Deep Linking Illegal
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I never really knew what deep linking meant... (Score:3, Funny)
"Jeg er dybt chokeret. Vi taber på alle punkter, men det er sikkert, at vi kærer til Landsretten, siger han."
breakin the law (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Available Now at Denny's (Score:3, Offtopic)
mmmm, breakfasty!
Deep linking implications (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Deep L:inking Defined (Score:5, Informative)
This lawsuit is pretty deep.
Also Illegal: (Score:5, Insightful)
- Citing specific pages in your footnotes.
- Pointing at specific locations with your finger.
No more search engines either (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Texas, and now Denmark (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Temporary ruling only... (Score:5, Informative)
Newsbooster has a press release [newsbooster.com] on the matter.
Moronic. (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sensible in moderation (Score:5, Insightful)
However, it is well known that deep linking is good linking [useit.com] 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 (Score:5, Funny)
"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"
deep linking or data mining? (Score:3, Informative)
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 [useit.com] 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 [slashdot.org]illustated, there are times when this will unfairly transfer hosting costs
Clarification (Score:5, Informative)
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 [www.fdih.dk] (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 (Score:5, Informative)
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- (Score:3, Funny)
Well, they *are* only human, perhaps this judge has some, ah, non-Danish lineage. This would explain this temporary lapse of judgement.
"'deep' linking" is a misleading term (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [dallasnews.com] is a deep link (to a website that has tried to force people not to link to them, I might add), while this [geocities.com] 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" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry to sound so RM-esque, but sometimes the words really *do* matter...
This case is about indexing, not deep linking (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Summary available at Yahoo (Score:5, Interesting)
7am.com versus Nando Times (Score:4, Informative)
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 [nando.net] when my 7am.com [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 [com.com] 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 [aardvark.co.nz] 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 [aardvark.co.nz] 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.