Hyperlinking is not copyright infringement, EU court rules

[n2doc]

Source: TF

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 European Union has been expanding since its creation in the 1950s and is now comprised of 28 member states, each committed to EU law.

One of the key roles of the EU’s Court of Justice is to examine and interpret EU legislation to ensure its uniform application across all of those member states. The Court is also called upon by national courts to clarify finer points of EU law to progress local cases with Europe-wide implications.

One such case, referred to the CJEU by Sweden’s Court of Appeal, is of particular interest to Internet users as it concerns the very mechanism that holds the web together.


Read more: http://torrentfreak.com/hyperlinking-is-not-copyright-infringement-eu-court-rules-140213/

[L0oniX]

1. It's stupid that this bullshit ever came to any court.

[melm00se]

3. If two parties

disagree and cannot amicably resolve their disagreement, how do you propose they resolve their differences?

[L0oniX]

9. Bombs and drones.

[melm00se]

10. or pistols at dawn

on the village green?

[rocktivity]

18. Oh, it's on!

rocktivity

[bananas]

12. This was resolved a long time ago

Some websites sued over "deep links"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking

<snip>

Ticketmaster later filed a similar case against Tickets.com, and the judge in this case ruled that such linking was legal as long as it was clear to whom the linked pages belonged.[2] The court also concluded that URLs themselves were not copyrightable, writing: "A URL is simply an address, open to the public, like the street address of a building, which, if known, can enable the user to reach the building. There is nothing sufficiently original to make the URL a copyrightable item, especially the way it is used. There appear to be no cases holding the URLs to be subject to copyright. On principle, they should not be."

<snip>

In a February 2006 ruling, the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court (Copenhagen) found systematic crawling, indexing and deep-linking by portal site ofir.dk of real estate site Home.dk not to conflict with Danish law or the database directive of the European Union. The Court even stated that search engines are desirable for the functioning of the Internet of today; and that, when publishing information on the Internet, one must assume—and accept—that search engines deep link to individual pages of one's website.[11]

<snip>

[bananas]

8. The lawsuits over caching were even stupider. nt

[Jesus Malverde]

14. Not really...

Similar law is used all the time in the US when they take down a site that links to streaming football games. They are not hosting the games or streaming them themselves.

Just linking to pirated content is enough to get the website seized.

[Orsino]

19. Really.

This bullshit is stupid.

[Fearless]

2. It's the equivelent of mentioning a news story to another person

Literally, it is mentioning a news story (et. al.) to another person.

[L0oniX]

4. ...or directions to the local library.

[Fearless]

6. Exactly.

[jsr]

13. Best analogy.

[PoliticAverse]

5. Good. n/t

[bananas]

7. "subscription service that indexes links to articles that can be found elsewhere online for free"

The dispute centers on a company called Retriever Sverige AB, an Internet-based subscription service that indexes links to articles that can be found elsewhere online for free.

The problem came when Retriever published links to articles published on a newspaper’s website that were written by Swedish journalists. The company felt that it did not have to compensate the journalists for simply linking to their articles, nor did it believe that embedding them within its site amounted to copyright infringement.

The journalists, on the other hand, felt that by linking to their articles Retriever had “communicated” their works to the public without permission. In the belief they should be paid, the journalists took their case to the Stockholm District Court. They lost their case in 2010 and decided to take the case to appeal. From there the Svea Court of Appeal sought advice from the EU Court.

[Downwinder]

11. The Napster decision said it was a violation to index them.

[bananas]

20. No.

Napster was indexing sites which were violating the copyright.
This service is indexing mainstream newspaper sites which are not violating the copyright.
Google News does the same thing, as do many other news aggregators.

Rug provided a ling to the decision in post #17:

The applicants in the main proceedings, all journalists, wrote press articles that were published in the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper and on the Göteborgs-Posten website. Retriever Sverige operates a website that provides its clients, according to their needs, with lists of clickable Internet links to articles published by other websites. It is common ground between the parties that those articles were freely accessible on the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper site. According to the applicants in the main proceedings, if a client clicks on one of those links, it is not apparent to him that he has been redirected to another site in order to access the work in which he is interested. By contrast, according to Retriever Sverige, it is clear to the client that, when he clicks on one of those links, he is redirected to another site.

http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=147847&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=7778

[pampango]

15. Damn those international courts trumping national sovereignty.

I see why those tea party folks are so worried about the UN and other international bodies that infringe on the sovereignty of our corporate government.

[Coyotl]

16. I do this a lot and I depend on others doing so for web traffic. Google does it all the time.

I definitely support the decision.

[rug]

17. There are six hperlinks in the story.

Here's a hyperlink to the decision.

http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=147847&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=7778

[CrackerJohn]

21. If hyperlinking wasn't allowed, the entire Internet would be useless.