Linking To Pirated Content Does Not Equal Copyright Infringement

Say you found a movie uploaded onto YouTube and you were to share that link on your blog or to your friends to said movie, would that count as copyright infringement? If we were to look at this logically, you are in some way spreading pirated content just by linking to it, right? However according to Advocate General Melchior Wathelet for the EU, it seems that linking to pirated content does not constitute as copyright infringement.

According to his advice to the EU courts, “…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.” His advice comes on the heels of a case from back in 2011 where a Dutch website linked to leaked Playboy photos.

Assuming that the EU courts were to take his advice seriously, it would certainly make for a landmark case in which future similar cases could use this as precedent. However that begs the question of torrent websites. Since torrent websites do not actually host the content, shouldn’t they be considered to be free of copyright infringement?

In such cases, the general purpose of the site needs to be taken into consideration. For example if you’re just a blogger sharing a link to a movie you enjoy, you might be given a pass, but if you’re a website whose sole purpose is to link to copyrighted material then you might find yourself in some legal trouble.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Legal, Piracy