A German court has ruled that search engines deep linking directly to news stories is against EU law.
The law in question is the “Database Directive,” a piece of European Union legislation that grants copyright protection to database creators for “selecting and arranging” the information contained in a database, even if the creator does not hold the copyrights on the collected information.
The directive also protects against the “unfair extraction” of materials contained in a database, specifically mentioning downloading or hyperlinking as examples of prohibited extraction methods.
Sigh.
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