Linking to copyrighted material already available on the internet is not in itself an act of copyright infringement according to European Court of Justice's advocate general Melchior Wathelet, whose role is to interpret existing law in order to provide legal opinion on a particular case.
In this instance (and perhaps what will be lead to a landmark ruling) Wathelet was advising on a case where Dutch website GeenStijl linked to leaked Playboy photos hosted on file-sharing site FileFactory. While Playboy was able to get the photos removed from FileFactory, GeenStijl simply linked to a new site hosting the same content.
“Hyperlinks which lead, even directly, to protected works are not ‘making them available’ to the public when they are already freely accessible on another website, and only serve to facilitate their discovery,” said the ECJ.
On the one hand, sites like the Pirate Bay could take advantage of this but, on the other hand, bloggers and news sites can now safely add links to their stories without worrying about inadvertent copyright infringement.
