Deep linking?

Dave Winer pointed me in the directon of a story on Wired regarding deeplinking. The story is particularly relevant for me as it involves the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association and the company Newsbooster (which has offices two floors above my office and by the way is hosted by our owners). The ruling in this case is going to affect rulings about copyright infringement in every country of EU.

The DNPA is apparently mad about Newsbooster creating links directly to individual stories on their websites, which the DNPA provides voluntarily and free of charge, thereby surpassing the frontpage and other pages the user otherwise would have to pass through (“click here” instead of “click here, click there, then there, scroll down, the click there”…).

Instead of spending money on lawsuits, the DNPA should get off their reptilian dinosaur butts and either plainly remove the content they don’t want linked, or lock out visitors coming from Newsbooster and/or other non-approved sources. That solution would be both cheaper and faster for them, and in the future they would not be forced to mobilize the army of lawyers whenever a vicious villain decides to overstep the borders of “intellectual property”.

This case makes me wonder if the DNPA is ready to even have an online presence. It seems to me that they are more comfortable in an enviroment based on writing and paper, where nobody would ever show a single story in a newspaper to a friend without showing him the frontpage and all the other pages first…