Newsbooster is convinced that its practice is legal. It publishes the headline and a very small part of the ingress, while providing a link back to the actual story, and clearly gives credit to the individual news publisher. The practice is common on the internet.
However, the Danish daily newspapers' trade political organisation, which counts all of Denmark’s daily newspapers as its members, has a policy of seeking court orders to stop news sites that systematically deep link to its members’ stories. It only wants links to the homepage of a newspaper’s web site, saying that the deep linking of Newsbooster “violates common principles of when and where to cite a source.”
The usual commercial objection to deep linking is that the homepage carries a site’s most prominent branding and that links to internal pages mean that the newspaper loses out on potential ad revenue – the value of which is likely to be proportional to the quantity of traffic to the homepage.
Legally, the objections include copyright infringement and passing off – where the user of a third party site is led to believe that the target story is written by the third party site or in some way affiliated with it.
Jeppe Kruse, a writer for Danish news site Magazine.dk, observes that the concern of the DNPA is not uncommon in smaller European countries where a site’s number of potential users is restricted to those who speak the language.
Kruse explains that the most popular sites in Denmark are run by those “who have been making print newspapers for decades.”
He continues:
"What they fail to realise is that good content in itself is not enough. Most users don't want to read in depth, but to overview the entire daily spectre of news. Users want it indexed, packaged, and delivered to their in-box, and a lot of them only read the headlines without following links anywhere. When more and more users adopt this stance, the packaging and indexing becomes just as important as the actual production of news. And those who actually produce journalistic content have two options: They can either try to recreate the market conditions they've had for centuries, and thereby interfere with basic principles of information on the web - or they can change. Until now, the majority have chosen the first option."
According to Newsbooster, most sites when threatened by the DNPA simply comply with its request to avoid a court battle. Newsbooster says it is prepared to fight, arguing that it adds value to newspapers by sending them traffic they would not otherwise receive.
The case is continuing in the Copenhagen City-Court.