Online publishers who knowingly link to illegally uploaded content are liable for copyright infringement, according to a European Court of Justice ruling that could have broad consequences for digital media.
The ruling, which marks the culmination of a five-year legal fight involving a Dutch blog, Playboy magazine and celebrity nude pictures, draws new lines around what has been a highly contested area of online copyright law.
Until now, Europe’s top court has tolerated the widespread practice of providing weblinks to unauthorised online content — whether films, pictures, video or text — concluding that this did not generally amount to a breach of copyright. Instead, the website that hosted the underlying content was liable.