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Hyperlinking Is Not Copyright Infringement, EU Court Rules

Posted by timothy on from the just-to-be-safe-please-type-the-link-yourself dept.

Freshly Exhumed writes "Does publishing a hyperlink to freely available content amount to an illegal communication to the public and therefore a breach of creator's copyrights under European law? After examining a case referred to it by Sweden's Court of Appeal, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled today that no, it does not. The Court found that 'In the circumstances of this case, it must be observed that making available the works concerned by means of a clickable link, such as that in the main proceedings, does not lead to the works in question being communicated to a new public.'" Reader Bart Smit points to the court's ruling.

9 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. TPB legit? by xfizik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does this mean The Pirate Bay is legit now?

    1. Re:TPB legit? by Fluffeh · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A Very interesting flow-on understanding.

      As they technically don't host any infringing materials, they shouldn't be anything but legit - though I think they get hit with something along the lines of "conspiracy to enable infrigement" or some such muck - in which case, this might not actually have any bearing.

      --
      Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
    2. Re:TPB legit? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Hasn't TPB's legal status always been 'We can't actually find any laws that they violate; but they just look so damn uppity and illegal that we couldn't possibly let them walk!'?

    3. Re:TPB legit? by suutar · · Score: 4, Informative

      While they don't host any infringing materials, a core assumption of the ruling is that "the thing being pointed to" is in fact authorized (in this case, news stories). The ruling states that creating the link is a communication to the public, and as such if the thing linked to is infringing, such a communication could be itself infringing or at least contributory. I don't think this helps them.

    4. Re:TPB legit? by AK+Marc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's the same as AllOfMP3. They were 100% legal, but shut down on pressure from the US to shut them down. No arrests. No charges. Just threats until they were shut down. The US believes in freedom of speech, unless they don't like it. hyperlinks are still illegal in the US, and taxpayer money was spent stiffling speech in other countries that didn't harm the US, but some businesses within the US asserted was harmful. Rights are available in the US only if you are rich enough to afford them.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    5. Re:TPB legit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Hasn't TPB's legal status always been 'We can't actually find any laws that they violate; but they just look so damn uppity and illegal that we couldn't possibly let them walk!'?

      Well. More or less.

      The prosecutor Hakan Roswall did some research a couple of month before the raid and wrote a report were he came to the conclusion that what TPB did was legal.
      Then the minister of justice Thosmas Bodstrom got a mail from the US government saying that they wanted TPB to get shut down so he called the prosecutor to his office and had a talk with him. (This is by the way illegal in Sweden, a minister isn't allowed to directly dictate what should happen. Regulations should be done through laws to make sure that they are enforced equally.)
      Then the police investigated the whole thing. After this another interesting thing happened. The officer Jim Keyse who was leading the investigation took a vacation. During this vacation he was on Warner Brothers payroll.

      I guess the reason the TPB-guys went to jail was more in the lines of coercion and bribes.

  2. DO NOTE by Gaygirlie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This ruling only applies to copyrighted content that is legally and publicly available. Linking to content that is behind e.g. a paywall would constitute a copyright-infringement. Similarly, it doesn't rule that linking to publicly available, but unauthorized content would be legal, that is an entirely different matter.

    Why is this ruling important, then? Well, it could be used as a stepping-stone for more in-depth ruling about linking to content, like e.g. the aforementioned unauthorized content. Similarly, many journalists, newspapers and whatnot have been sued in the recent past for copyright-infringement simply for linking to an article on another newspapers' website. Some companies are even trying to extort money from Google and other search-engines for the same thing, so now they could possibly use this ruling as a defense. Search-engines aren't journalists, that's true, but a new ruling could be based on this one and grant search-engines the same rights in hyperlinking.

  3. Re: by jakesyl · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Search is hyperlinking..

  4. Re:Internet 101 by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The internet before search depended on hyperlinking.

    Even that aside, 'hyperlinking' is pretty much an improved flavor of citation. If you are going to ban 'hyperlinks to illegal material' you are this close to just banning the mere mention of illegal material; except easier to sell because there are scary computer words involved.

    Whether you see this as ironic, or as a continuation of copyright's original purpose, it is simply a matter of fact that the defenders of this sort of 'property' are learning that doing what they want requires rolling back all sorts of long-held rights. Worse, they seem OK with this.