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posted by martyb on Saturday September 10 2016, @04:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-go-there dept.

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)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 11 2016, @12:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 11 2016, @12:02AM (#400146)

    I always found it to be ironic that CONTROL was working for the free market capitalist side and KAOS was working for the planned economy communist side. Shouldn't control and chaos have been the other way around?