Danish court approves of “deep-linking”

  • Jon Lund 

Search-engines are desirable for the functioning of the internet of today. So says the danish Maritime and Commercial Court (Copenhagen) – “Sø og Handelsretten” – in a ruling friday. And goes on stating that one, when publishing information on the internet, must assume searchengines will create links directly to individual pages of ones website.

Breaks new grounds
Thereby the court breaks new grounds in the standing conflict between content-owners, wanting to retain the rights to content, and internet-entrepreneurs wanting to take advantage of the internets potentials for sharing information.

Real-estate-specific – with a generic touch
The ruling itself deals with the case of the marketleading Danish realestate broker “Home” vs. the “OFiR” portal, who crawls, indexes and links to the Home website. (As such it does not pretend to rule on the whole deeplinking issue. It rules specifically on the realestate-broker vs. portals domain – allthough the wording of central paragraphs are very generic: “search-engines of various sorts … must be deemed desirable” (p. 128), “actors must assume searchengines to establish links…” (p. 129).)

Read for yourself
Go read the verdict for yourself here (its in danish, the interesting part goes from page 125 and onwards): http://www.domstol.dk/media/-300011/files/v010899.pdf

UPDATE: Update to this post: This is not a database! Says court about online real estate-database in deep-linking case of OFiR vs. HOME