EU Court Ruled Linking to Copyrighted Content is Legal

[Harry-Potter]

The Court of Justice of the European Union has recently handed down its decision on copyright case, saying that publishing a hyperlink doesn’t violate holder’s copyright under European law. The case in question was referred to the court by Sweden’s Court of Appeal. So, it turned out to be safe to publish a link anywhere in Europe without a fear of being sued.

 

 

The case was built around a company Retriever Sverige AB – an online subscription service which indexed links to articles posted elsewhere on the Internet free. The service published links to articles located on a newspaper’s site, written by Swedish journalists. When the newspapers demanded cash from the service, Retriever Sverige AB refused to pay. The journalists claimed that by linking to their articles the service had “communicated” their works to everybody without permission. Demanding their pay, the journalists took the case to the Stockholm District Court four years ago, but lost and had to appeal. From there the Svea Court of Appeal sought advice from the European Court.

Now the Court of Justice ruled that in the circumstances of this case, making the articles available via a clickable link doesn’t make them “communicated” to a new public. The court explained that the public targeted by the initial communication included all potential visitors to the website concerned. Thus, taking into account that access to the works on that website wasn’t subject to any restrictive measures, any person in the world could have free access to them from the very beginning. And since there was no new public, the service didn’t need authorization of the rights owners for a communication to the public.

However, the court decision also pointed out that while publishing a link to freely available material doesn’t result in infringement, in some circumstances money would have to change hands. For example, if a clickable link enabled users of the website to circumvent paywalls, then those people would become a new public and the violation would occur.

This court decision appears to be good news for people who want to embed a YouTube video in their blog, but not so good for certain collecting entities who require payment of a licensing fee for that embedding.