The headline reads like something from The Onion. The European Union Court of Justice finally ruled that hyperlinks on the Internet are legal. This might seem obvious, but journalists in Sweden attempted to fight this commonplace concept. The question was about linking to other people’s content: is it legal to have links to other web pages that contain freely available content? In this case, Swedish company Retriever Sverige AB was hosting a subscription service where users could easily get links to news articles across the web. It is a type of news aggregator service; the company does not write the articles, but searches the Internet and collects links from other sites and organizes them for the user. A number of journalists then sued Retriever, claiming that, even though their articles are freely available, Retriever was violating their copyright by linking to them.
The case started in Stockholm District Court. The court struck down the case, siding with Retriever. The journalists then appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal, who then asked the EU Court of Justice for advice on how to proceed. The EU Court of Justice exists to provide advice to member states’ courts on cases involving EU law. This Thursday, the EU Court published its decision, and advised upholding the lower court’s decision.
The decision is extremely important, because links are a fundamental part of the World Wide Web. If links were suddenly illegal without the linked site’s consent, the Internet would become unusable. The court wrote that “making available the works concerned by means of a clickable link […] does not lead to the works in question being communicated to a new public.” [1] In other words, since the websites were freely available anyway, just linking to them does not violate copyright.
Of course, there are still a lot of cases where links on the Internet are not legal. Publishing links to illegal copyrighted content is still against the law. For example, posting links to illegal steaming sites for watching movies is considered a copyright violation. The reason in that case is because by linking to the illegal content, you are communicating the content to new people that for whom the original author did not allow. However, links to freely available sites are perfectly fine, since the site is already open to the general public. Therefor, you do not need the consent of the author just to link to their site.
This decision is in line with a paper published by the European Copyright Society concerning the case. “As Tim-Berners Lee, who is regularly accredited as being an inventor of the World Wide Web, has explained, a standard hyperlink is nothing more than a reference or footnote, and that the ability to refer to a document is a fundamental right of free speech.” [2]
The EU Court’s advice is still just advice, so the Sweden court is still free to rule however it wants on the matter. However, it is most likely that the court will respect the EU’s opinion, and dismiss the case. If things had gone differently, and the EU Court ruled against hyperlinks being legal, then basically every site, from news providers to blogs to Wikipedia and Google, would have to receive written permission any time they want to link to another site. The Internet as we know it would no be able to function, and progress would halt entirely. We are very lucky that the right decision was made here and the Internet can continue working as it did before. If only copyright law in the United States could be settled as nicely and cleanly as it was in this case.
[1] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=147847&cid=7778&doclang=en
[2] http://www.ivir.nl/news/European_Copyright_Society_Opinion_on_Svensson.pdf
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