Deep Linking Could Be Infringement In Germany If Website Puts Even Ridiculous Weak Attempts To Block It

from the anti-circumvention dept

We've pointed out numerous problems with anti-circumvention rules, which make it infringement to break pretty much any attempt at circumventing any type of content protection measures (even if not to infringe on the copyright). Sometimes courts realize how silly this is, such as a ruling from a few years ago in Europe, which noted that it's silly to consider such anti-circumvention rules reasonable if the technical protection measures are not considered "effective." In other words, if your protection scheme is laughable, it's silly to make it infringement to get around it. Apparently not all the courts in Europe have gotten this message yet. An anonymous reader points us to a case from a few months back in Germany, in which the court said that deep linking to content that had ridiculously weak measures to block deep-linking is still infringing (that link is a not so great Google translation of the original German -- though, the submitter gave a more complete explanation).

In this case, the content involved online maps, and the "protection measures" were that to visit a page with an actual map, you had to have a sessionID, that you would get as you visited the website. If you went to a deeper page without a sessionID, you would be redirected to the front page. Of course, it's not hard to actually provide the user with a sessionID, which one site did upon linking to these maps, meaning that visitors went straight to the deep-linked page, rather than being redirected to the home page. This is basically how the internet works. While the lower court properly rejected the copyright infringement claim as being ridiculous since the technical protection measures were so laughable, the higher court appeared to ignore all precedent on this matter, and said that as long as the site owner made any attempt whatsoever to block such deep linking, getting around those measures could represent infringement.

Filed Under: copyright, deep linking, drm, germany, session id