This is not a database! Says court about online real estate-database in deep-linking case of OFiR vs. HOME
Update to my post “Danish Court approves of deep-linking”. Reads through the verdict once more and finds out the www.home.dk realestate-database is found not to be a database at all. Therefore http://www.home.dk/ is not subject to the European Union Database-directive – and therefore deep-links to the “database” is OK.
Sure it’s a database…
Clearly from a technological and user-centric point of view the Home database is a database. After all Real Estate broker HOME sells nearly 25 % of all houses in Denmark. And the database – or website, as it is – allows you to search through all of these, complete with Google earth-like satellite camera-tours.
…No it’s not!
But nevertheless it’s not a database from a juridical point of view. At least not in the sense of the beforementioned directive. The database directive protects the database as such – not the content in it. (The content is protected through copyright-laws).
The content is to good
Actually the quality of the content – information about houses for sale - seems to disqualify the database from being a true database: the content is to good! To be a database, the directive requires that the data to be put in the database should be already there before the database-creator populates his database. If he himself enriches the data, the database turns from being af mere container of data to a production system of the database-company.
Probably goes for news-sites as well
This seems to imply that among others also the databases of news-sites are not databases in the directive-sense, and therefore might not be protected from deep-links.
Potential competition also important
The OFiR vs. HOME verdict also consider other aspects, however. It seems to be important to the Court, that portal OFiR (based on revenues from bannerads) does not compete with real estate site HOME, funded by fees from houses actually sold.
Read for yourself
Go read the verdict for yourself here (its in danish, the interesting part goes from page 125 and onwards): http://www.domstol.dk/media/-300011/files/v010899.pdf
