Second, I hold no direct “anger” towards Krak.dk or Kraks Forlag AS, or anybody employed there. I’m well aware that you’ve shredded the invoice which was to be sent to Per Kaarup (he’s not a customer by the way, he’s a friend), and I’m glad for that, in fact, for me things would probably have been left at that if YOU hadn’t stated that you had changed your policy on my blog.

You see, what I’m really concerned with, and this is the issue which really needs to be addressed is the matter of your UNCHANGED, despite announcements to the contrary, policy on deep linking.

As for trying to understand your situation, I do. From a business point of view I can understand exactly why you would want to charge people to link into specific URLs on your service.

However it’s misguided, and a clear misunderstanding of how the internet works to attempt to charge companies money for deep linking without notifying them of your terms of service.

The problem with the existing policy on Krak.dk is a simple matter of Web Design. That’s it! Nothing more!

As hard as it may be to believe, I have no problem with charging for access to content that is located behind the front URL of a web site. Or to put it another way, I have no problem with charging for deep linking, if (and this “if” is important) it is done properly.

There is nothing stopping Kraks from implementing a system where by incoming links from business web sites are blocked, redirected or allowed through depending on their IP address or originating domain.

Paying business sites would then have full access to your service and other sites would be cut off.

But, from a business point of view, cutting off non-paying sites from deep linking to your site reduces your revenue generated from the advertising placed on the sites? (As a matter of interest, do you show advertising on URLs accessed by paying customers?)

It’s easy to see why you wouldn’t want to implement the (relatively easy and less costly than lawyers and court battles) software solution when it will reduce your revenue from advertising.

So that leaves you one other, simple, cheaper to implement and impossible to argue with solution.

If a single link to your terms of Service were include on the front page and map pages, then there would be no possibility of anybody complaining about this policy in the future. More to the point, if this link were included, I would shut up talking and posting about Krak.dk.

I know, as do I’m sure you do Poul, that it’s not hard to implement such a link on the site. So why isn’t it there?

Is it such a crime to notify users that they may potential be subject to fees up front?

So, simple question. Why have you not yet updated your policy on your web site to reflect your publicly stated policy?

But I’m afraid your anger towards Krak – which I cannot understand – complety blinds you. Some of the stuff you write is down right untrue. I do believe I have some insight concerning business models on the internet, and my knowledge of legal issues could surely be better, but at least I have some – and I don’t agree with you. I hope I am entitled to that.

You write under the impression that Krak is populated with fools, and they dont know a thing about the internet. Given Kraks position this makes no sense, and I really dont care much for further discussions with you. I try to understand your situation. You don’t care to do the same. Discussion is meaningless.

Also, you stated on my blog and on Digg that com that you’ve changed your policy on private users linking, but as of yet have not updated Krak.dk to reflect the alleged new policy or inform users that such a policy exists.

If you want an example of how to properly implent this check out Flickr and their TOS links on the bottom of their pages.

What you still have here is a “sugar-trap”, plain and simple.

Also, as a side note, Poul. You surround your maps with advertising on every URL. You also scrape the names, adresses and other information from Danish companies and use them to generate income via the advertising around your maps without asking their permission. Now, it can be assumed that the specific URLS to maps on your service have little to no value without being able to display the address of the company that is being requested. Don’t you think its hypocritical of your comany to make money off of their names without asking permission in the first place.

You may so no! You may say it’s free advertising for them and a good service. They and I will tell you that them linking to URLs on Krak is providing your service with more value, free advertising and potential advertising views.

But not only do you want the free advertising, you want folks to pay for linking to their own information which you are using without permission.

After all, you’ve got my company listed and I NEVER recieved so much as an email asking if you could. And their is a copyright notification on the bottom of my companies site.

There have been several in Europe over the last few years. Most of them actually goes against the deep linking practice. Not against the possibility of doing deep links, but in order to protect the content of the databases in question. You may disagree, I am only referring the facts.

Most EU member countries have ratified the EU directive 96/9/EC on the protection of database content. The company often claimed to have won a case on deep linking in Denmark (OFIR) actually won the case, because the database was not a database as defined in the EU directive. It was not really about deep linking. But it appears according to the ruling that you can deep link to a database that is not (“sweat of the brow” nor “sui generis”) original. Krak’s on the other hand is at the least “sui generis” original.

What Krak acutally did, was to open up for private people and non commercial sites to use a service, that until recently has been a paid service for all users.

Just to offer a little perspective….