Linking May Be Illegal In Europe

from the there-goes-the-internet dept

It seems that some European judges really have a problem understanding the internet. Following the Danish ruling that deep linking is illegal, a new ruling in Germany, based on laws of the EU suggests that deep linking may be completely illegal throughout Europe. This is simply ridiculous. It's based on a law designed to protect the intellectual property that goes into creating databases, saying that people can't extract info from those databases - and includes "linking" as a way to "extract" information. Say what? Basically, if I read this properly, it is illegal to link in Europe. Not deep link. Just to link. Because any link is extracting some information from a database, violating the copyright that whoever set up that website owns. The internet is now illegal in Europe. Let's try to explain this one more time for the people who have been slow to catch on: if you don't want people linking to you don't put stuff on the internet. If you're really so stupid that you don't want people linking to you, but still want to be on the internet, then put up some (very simple to create) technology guards to prevent people from linking to you. This is stupid, because it drives away traffic, but if that's what you want... This case is particularly bad, because the news search engine that was found guilty of violating this law actually removed the site in question when asked, and still got sued.