From Wired.
Following links from one Web page to another may soon require users to run special stealth applications, if a Danish search company’s experience is a sign of things to come.
To link directly to some newspapers’ content, Danish search firm Newsbooster now must use the sort of decentralized subterfuge utilized by companies that distribute file-sharing applications.
File-sharing systems such as Kazaa and Gnutella have so far avoided the sort of legal hassles that brought down Napster by networking their users’ computers together, instead of serving up files from a single server. The accepted wisdom is that it’s easier to pursue corporations whose software may be used to violate copyrights, but tracking down and stopping a dispersed network of individual violators is significantly more difficult.
Those who engage in illegal linking may soon be forced to do the same.
Last July, Newsbooster was ordered by the Bailiff’s Court of Copenhagen to stop deep linking to newspaper articles on three Danish newspapers’ Internet sites. The court found that Newsbooster’s deep linking was in violation of European Community copyright laws (PDF).
Newsbooster awaits a final ruling in the case. A court date scheduled for last week has been postponed until next month.
In the meantime, Newsbooster has launched an alternative service, which Newsbooster editor-in-chief Nicolai Lassen refers to as a “physiological moving-out of Denmark.”
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