Hyperlinking Is Not Copyright Infringement, EU Court Rules

Freshly Exhumed writes "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 Court found that 'In the circumstances of this case, it must be observed that making available the works concerned by means of a clickable link, such as that in the main proceedings, does not lead to the works in question being communicated to a new public.'" Reader Bart Smit points to the court's ruling.

Re:TPB legit?

[suutar]

While they don't host any infringing materials, a core assumption of the ruling is that "the thing being pointed to" is in fact authorized (in this case, news stories). The ruling states that creating the link is a communication to the public, and as such if the thing linked to is infringing, such a communication could be itself infringing or at least contributory. I don't think this helps them.

Re:TPB legit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't TPB's legal status always been 'We can't actually find any laws that they violate; but they just look so damn uppity and illegal that we couldn't possibly let them walk!'?

Well. More or less.

The prosecutor Hakan Roswall [wikipedia.org] did some research a couple of month before the raid and wrote a report were he came to the conclusion that what TPB did was legal.
Then the minister of justice Thosmas Bodstrom [wikipedia.org] got a mail from the US government saying that they wanted TPB to get shut down so he called the prosecutor to his office and had a talk with him. (This is by the way illegal in Sweden, a minister isn't allowed to directly dictate what should happen. Regulations should be done through laws to make sure that they are enforced equally.)
Then the police investigated the whole thing. After this another interesting thing happened. The officer Jim Keyse who was leading the investigation took a vacation. During this vacation he was on Warner Brothers payroll.

I guess the reason the TPB-guys went to jail was more in the lines of coercion and bribes.

Re:Wait a second...

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't I read the opposite [slashdot.org] just yesterday?

No, that case was different since he copied the files and shared them from an own server. Had he linked to the originals he would have been safe according to this ruling.