Simon Willison’s Weblog

More on deep linking

5th July 2002

It seems there’s more to the Danish deep linking story than first meets the eye. This comment on Slashdot clarifies some important details:

[...] 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 [...] and since Newsbooster copied what would be considered as a database, the ruling was against Newsbooster.