Newsbooster news service convicted

Blogs may vanish from the Internet
Indeed, Newsbooster became the first Internet resource sentenced by a court.

PRAVDA.Ru has already published articles about the scandalous lawsuit between the Danish Newspaper Organization (DNPO) and the Newsbooster news service. The Association demanded that Newsbooster should be prohibited from posting so-called "deep links" to news published by Danish editions. DNPO says that deep links violate the law on trade mark protection. Users should reach other pages of the site through the front page only, otherwise, when reaching some articles through other sources, users might get a different picture of the web-page on the whole.

However, on the other hand, it is perfectly clear that the more links are given, the more users will read the referred articles and the rating of the site itself is surely to increase due to links. Moreover, it is easier for users to find articles of interest with the help of deep links.

The other day, the Danish court agreed with DNPO's claims against Newsbooster; the latter is now forbidden to give deep links to publications of DNPO members. The AP informs that Newsbooster attorneys are going to appeal against the court decision. Nevertheless, this unprecedented decision has been already been made, and it is not ruled out that, following DNPO, other resources may also complain of deep links. Specialists say that Newsbooster, being a very popular news service, will not suffer greatly from the prohibition of deep links to DNPO sources. However, they say that a chain reaction may follow, the consequences of which can hardly be predicted.

PRAVDA.Ru held an opinion poll among representatives of Russian sources on the Internet. Editor-in-chief of Yandex Yelena Kolmanovskaya, Editor-in-chief of SMI.ru Andrey Levkin, Lenty.Ru producer Denis Usatenko, head of the Hosted Search project with Rambler Internet Holding Pavel Legenya, and representative of the Antiwar.com international news site Eric Garris almost unanimously agree that the DNPO initiative to prohibit deep links is absurd. The Danish court sticks to a different opinion. So, it is not ruled out that similar sanctions will be applied to such really very popular news portals like Fark.com, Memepol, Antiwar.com, Metafilter, Blog, etc. Even Yahoo can be involved.

Sergey Stefanov PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Maria Gousseva