Dutch Court Rules Weblogging is Legal
The Financial Times is reporting that a court in The Netherlands has found in favor of a Web Site called Kranten.com in a case bought against it by the leading Dutch media company, PCM. PCM had claimed that Kranten.com should not be allowed to place links on its site that bypass the PCM Web Sites' home pages, such as deVolkskrant.nl.
Essentially, this ruling appears to find that Weblogging is not a copyright violation in The Netherlands.
Rulings like this are important because many large media companies operating advertising supported sites have attempted to claim that third parties should not be permitted to link into the interior of their Web Sites without explicit permission. The media companies claim that such deep linking deprives them advertsing revenue that they would otherwise get if users had to enter their Web Sites through their home page.
People and companies operating Weblogs have argued that a substantial portion of the value of the World Wide Web is to be able to connect content produced by different people or companies together using hypertext links. Depriving Web Sites of the right to do this would, they argue, isolate information and reduce the value of all Web content.