Krak.dk who’s attacking deep linkers are much worse

In the weekend it was reported and got quite well known that Krak.dk (Kraks Forlag A/S) demands a $1000 payment from a blogger deep linking to their site. But Krak.dk aren’t exactly saints with their scraped texts and 100.000’s of deep links – including deep links to sites that clearly prohibits it and haven’t granted Krak.dk permission to deep link.

First of, Krak.dk does have a copyright statement (somewhat hidden though) that states it’s not allowed to deep link a URL for maps. Whether that is reasonable according to the law is questionable. But I’m no expert on law so I’ll just stick to what I deem as fair and reasonable, and what is not. One thing I expect from others is that they follow the rules they’re expecting me to follow – and that isn’t exactly what Krak.dk does, it’s quite the opposite actually.

A quick study of Krak.dk makes it obvious that they’re in fact a big scraper site and that Krak.dk is one of the sites utilizing deep linking the most in Denmark – excluding Google, et al. Yes, indeed they’re actually scraping most of the websites for danish companies, and they publish content from them, in huge parts, on krak.dk with deep links to the URL’s they scraped.

I quickly found some major danish newspaper websites that Krak.dk is deep linking. Websites that have clear policies on systematic and repetitive deep linking not being allowed. I contacted one of the newspapers to hear if they had granted Krak.dk permission to deep link their pages. The person I spoke with said that Krak.dk doesn’t have any special permission to deep link and he would investigate if what Krak.dk does is reasonable.

Not only do Krak.dk deep link to 100.000’s of pages, they also publish content from these pages. And in some cases they’re publishing up to 90% of the content from the pages, which is far beyond a fair quotation. If that wasn’t enough, they’re also breaking framed pages which leads some of the linked pages to appear without navigation and the opportunity to buy products etc. From the current legal situation in Denmark, I understand this as being illegal.

Here’s a deep* link to a random example of Krak.dk’s deep linking, and a link to Krak.dk’s deep linking of a newspapers website** a website has a “no deep linking” policy.

In short it seems that Krak.dk believe they can deep link whatever content they want - even when it’s clearly not allowed. But if you deep link to their pages you’ll have to pay them approx. $1000 and remove the link. I don’t think that there’s any doubt that this is just a typical illicit business practice by Krak.dk. Since they could’ve prevented deep linking, but don’t do it. They’re only interested in people actually linking to them so they can bill them an unreasonable high amount of money.

I’ve talked to a person named Peter from Krak.dk. He couldn’t answer or comment on anything other than specific questions - which I was unable to ask. I wanted to know if they’d actually pay if other people and companies sent them invoices and demanded payments for the many pages they’re deep linking without permission. I believe Krak.dk wouldn’t whereas Krak.dk shouldn’t be paid either! Secondly, he stated the deep linking issue with the blogger, being a matter of copyright infringement but he failed to make it clear how the deep link could be a copyright infringement!

* Krak.dk’s copyright notice states you can’t deep link the map URL’s (danish): “Det er heller ikke tilladt at linke til en Krak Kort-URL på din hjemmeside (deep linking).” So in reverse I can deep link other URL’s than those for their maps.
** The newspaper website bt.dk is not the newspaper whom I talked to about Krak.dk’s deep linking practice.