Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Comments from Newsbooster (site involved in law suit)
[newsbooster.com ]
Background Here
[wired.com ]
however this could gain some feet, and start to take off, as some of the big national paper publishers, which are dependant mostly on income from off the shelf sales, have been facing considerable reductions in sales, becuase of the advent of the digital age, > a.k.a. free information on the web.
I doubt very few sites would request not to be deeplinked to, though i know a few that do (and aggressively claim that deeplinking is 'illegal' which is a doubtful claim in most parts of the world) and doubt they would make much difference really to how the web works.
[edited by: chiyo at 3:41 pm (utc) on July 5, 2002]
Having lived in DK since 1995 (on and off) I've come to the opinion that the danes are sometimes a little hasty in judgement. But common sense generally prevails in the end.
My guess is that this will go to the next level and get overturned.
Nick
Here’s how it works.
Newsbooster has a robot that visits a large number of news sites all over the world. When you set up your account you keywords that Newsbooster should look for. It then copies the headlines of the matching news and publishes them in your personal newsletter, together with a deep link back to the source.
You pay EUR 199,- (about the same in US$) for a 12 month subscribtion. So they are actually making money on deep links to free news sites.
Torben
I agree that deep linking is welcomed in most cases as long as the site linking isn't trying to hide the ownership and the copyright is clear.
However, this is a case where Newsbooster.com is making money on deep links.
WmW is a free site with no advertising, which means that Brett needs another income. Do you think that Brett on purpose would let another company profit on his free content with out getting a revenue share?
This is a very complex case, which is why news sites from all over the world are watching.
Torben
If I had an online newspaper, I'd welcome anything that brought me traffic from visitors that would have been unlikely to visit otherwise. (Of course, these Danish news sites might not need the traffic. I know when there's breaking news I always check The Copenhagen Times right before I head to CNN.com. ;))
Well, maybe the 'profit' is a grey area but I think the only recompense he gets is links back to the site.
Brett?
Nick
However if these sites are not designed to do this, I can understand they think they may not be getting the branding or revenue they would want than if somebody entered from the front page.
There is also the issue of reproducing the headline.If you have a RSS feed you are saying that the headline is OK to republish, but if you are being scraped or spidered without your permission you could have a case.
As far as making money off linking to other's content, that is a fairly well established practice. Almost all search engines do it. Directories do it. Many news aggregators do it. Moreover does it, though they ask first. Weblogs sometimes do it, tho there is reportedly only one definately making money. :)
I guess the question to the management is not how much a "distribitor" or "repackager" is making but whether its actually increasing the revenue for the site or maybe decreasing it.
If i was running these dutch newspapers and losing money becuase of the news aggregator site, then I guess I would be suing too, if i couldnt find any other way to block their scraper or spider. I guess they dont respect robot.txt and they use different IP addresses to connect so they cant be blocked.
Nick
zeus
Yeah, Denmark can be an odd place sometimes, particularly where law and government are concerned. We recently elected a party that has an part of made of of serious bigots/racists with outrageous immigration policy's.
Nick
it's just another of those wrong judical decrees due to ignorant judges that happen all the time when it comes to internet related issues.
this would mean to shut down search-engines and almost all pages that have links to actual content. this would mean to stop printing tv-magazines and whatnot.
there seems to be some kind of new law out there (not sure if it only appeals to internet issues) that says "if you are a small company and you do something that lowers the biz of a big company, you will loose the trial, no matter what it's about".
otherwise, go and sue altavista for deeplinking... good luck.
Nick
I have been involved in the case, consulting NewsBooster on search related issues before, under and now after the case - so I know a great deal about the details of the case.
I was there during the case and at the ruling today and there is nothing in the ruling that fit NewsBooster that would not fit Google or FAST as well. Had it been either one of the two engines that had been on trial - and not NewsBooster - they would have lost. In many ways, what Google and FAST is doing is far more extreme than what NewsBooster is doing and was convicted for. I only have to mention caching of full pages, converting of formats (manipulation of copyrighted material), picture search etc …
What happened today is that a search engines was banned in court – it could have been any search engine, but the newspapers lawyers (wisely) chose a very small one with limited funds to defend themselves.
Google make money too (I hope so), and both FAST and Inktomi try to do that also :) – There is no different from what Google is trying to do and What NewsBooster is doing. They basically run a search engine. Google cover everything – NewsBooster just cover a small corner of the Internet. Google make money on what they collect by crawling from partnerships and advertising. NewsBooster do it by subscription.
The ruling said nothing about HOW NewsBooster makes money from the service – just the fact that it is NewsBoosters _core_ business to make money from the URL’s they find by crawling the web. That is exactly what any search engine (tries) to do.
I will be ready to answer any detailed questions any of you might have about the case. Also, if you are with the press and need to talk to me or any of the involved parties in the case I can arrange for it.
I usually do not reveal my phone and e-mail publicly like this, but the case is to important for any delays so you are welcome to contact me at either: newsbooster@joyzone.dk or (+45) 22 27 07 10 – direct line.
Was newbooster obeying robots.txt exclusions? Was that issue brought into the case at all?
Do you think this is a case of the 'danish complacensy' seen in many industries in .dk? I mean, competition is almost a dirty word right, so I figure it's just a case of sour grapes and showing of muscle.
Do you think/know if it will go a level higher?
Nick (english living in .dk)
Yes, the case WILL go to a higher level. This afternoons discussion and I had with the CEO of the company concluded that. It also looks like they found the money for it, so the case do not end here.
But this case is not just any little case. The newspapers are very powerful politically here (like, I guess, they are most places in the free world). The ruling today was political – no doubt about that. There are some very strong forces – some of the strongest – behind the newspapers here. They fought this case at a level that no one had expected using more lawyers and more time than normally for this type of cases. They rolled out the complete army for this and they are not going to stop at the next level. They believe wining this case to the top is fundamental for newspapers to stay alive in the future – They think that if they loose Denmark will soon have no newspapers at all, and I think they have a good chance of convincing a lot of powerful people, businesses and organizations about this. It’s sad but true.
zeus
We've already seen several. The most recent one was the Dallas newspaper one. More will surely follow.
That is interesting Mikkel.
The last part is off course where we have the real problem here and why this ruling is important for everyone.
what did the judge say about the robots.txt issue ?
