News aggregator Newsbooster.com was on Friday ordered by the Bailiff’s Court in Copenhagen to remove from its web site and electronic newsletters all deep links to news articles in the web sites of 28 Danish newspapers. It is also prohibited from reproducing the headlines of the publications.
Newsbooster publishes the headline and a very small part of the ingress of stories from various on-line newspapers. It provides a link back to the actual story – the deep link – and gives credit to the individual news publisher.
However, the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association only wants links to the homepage of a newspaper’s web site, mainly because bypassing the homepage of a web site can adversely affect advertising revenue.
The publishers relied on the EU’s Database Directive of 1996 which was implemented into Danish law by amending the country’s Copyright Act. This Directive introduced special copyright protections for makers of databases. The court noted that the Danish Parliament had described a database as:
"a collection of independent works, data or other materials arranged in a systematic or methodical way or individually accessible by electronic or other means."
Judge Michael Kistrup reasoned that:
"Internet media consist of, for example, text collections in the form of articles, information, advertisements, etc. The selection or compilation of relevant text collections and the detailed display of such collections on the web sites, which make up the internet media, must, in general, be characterised as the result of structured systems or methods…"
He concluded that “the text collections of headlines and articles, which make up some internet media, are thus found to constitute databases enjoying copyright protection” under the database laws.
He then quoted wording from the EU’s Directive:
"…databases requiring the investment of considerable financial resources shall enjoy special protection against extraction or re-utilisation of the entire contents of the database or a substantial part thereof."
Judge Kistrup wrote that “Newsbooster’s search engine – and therefore not the users – needs to crawl the web sites of the internet media frequently for the purpose of registering headlines and establishing deep links in accordance with the search criteria defined by the users. As a result, Newsbooster repeatedly and systematically reproduces and publishes the [publishers’] headlines and articles.”
The reasoning of the Judge does not mean that deep links are illegal in Denmark. This case looked at a web site that was systematically trawling and linking to third party content – which is not the same as manually creating occasional links to third party sites.
Judge Kistrup also noted that Newsbooster has a commercial interest in its activity – it charges annual subscriptions for the services that sparked the lawsuit. He reasoned that as a consequence of Newsbooster’s use of deep linking, it becomes, to a certain extent, “unnecessary to search or browse the internet newspapers” – which would affect the value of their advertising.
The deep linking was also found to conflict “with fair marketing practices” and therefore contravened the Danish Marketing Practices Act.
Following the ruling, A spokesman for the Association said: “It would have been difficult for newspapers to do business if the bailiff’s court had reached the opposite result.”
Newsbooster immediately removed the links from its web site but said that it will appeal the ruling. It warned that, if the decision stands, it will affect the development of search engine technology.
The decision only prohibits deep linking to the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association’s 28 web sites. Newsbooster.com retains links to 4,480 newspapers.