If you thought newspapers had stopped biting the hand that feeds them, think again. In Denmark, the deep linking issue has reared its head again with the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association (DONA) arguing aggregators like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News should not be linking to their individual web stories; instead, they should force readers to go through the front door, GlobalVoices says. The association’s chief legal adviser Anne Louise Schelin, in a mailing list discussion reproduced at Medieblogger, said aggregating news links may be illegal.
In truth, it’s not clear whether the association is referring to links alone or the copying of their stories’ introductory paragraphs by aggregators, but only the former is mentioned. Indeed, back in 2002, a Danish judge outlawed Newsbooster, a subscription news search service that emailed story links to users, and Belgium’s Copiepresse newspaper association also won a similar action stopping Google News from linking and summarising. But much of the industry has moved on, with many offering bookmarking tools and FT.com, for example, making more free articles available precisely to win more hits for individual pages.