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The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that a Court of Justice of the European Union ruling could threaten hyperlinking as we know it:
In a case which threatens to cause turmoil for thousands if not millions of websites, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided today that a website that merely links to material that infringes copyright, can itself be found guilty of copyright infringement, provided only that the operator knew or could reasonably have known that the material was infringing. Worse, they will be presumed to know of this if the links are provided for "the pursuit of financial gain".
The case, GS Media BV v. Sanoma, concerned a Dutch news website, GeenStijl, that linked to leaked pre-publication photos from Playboy magazine, as well as publishing a thumbnail of one of them. The photos were hosted not by GeenStijl itself but at first by an Australian image hosting website, then later by Imageshack, and subsequently still other web hosts, with GeenStijl updating the links as the copyright owner had the photos taken down from one image host after another.
The court's press release [PDF] spins this decision in such a positive light that much reporting on the case, including that by Reuters, gets it wrong, and assumes that only for-profit websites are affected by the decision. To be clear, that's not the case. Even a non-profit website or individual who links to infringing content can be liable for infringing copyright if they knew that the material was infringing, for example after receiving notice of this from the copyright holder. And anyway, the definition of "financial gain" is broad enough to encompass any website, like GeenStijl, that runs ads.
GS Media BV v Sanoma Media Netherlands BV and Others (C-160/15)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 10 2016, @06:15PM
While this is probably contrary to most of the opinions on this site, I've always toyed around with the idea that copyright holders could hold the advertising companies which use the infringing websites monetarily responsible. Most if not all of the copyright infringing websites make their money off advertising, yet are small and often fly-by-night companies, while the online ad serving companies are agglomerating into larger and larger players. This seems a perfect solution to protecting fair use yet punishing blatant copyright infringement.
Of course the moneyed interests in advertising would fight this with all their might, since they make bundles from advertising all those warez.