Highest court in the EU considers criminalizing website Hyperlinks
HIGHEST EU COURT CONSIDERS
CRIMINALIZING WEBSITE HYPERLINKS
Social media, online journalism, blogs, web
searches, comment sections could all be affected...
FEBRUARY
5, 2016
Presiding over a
case threatening the nature of the web as we know it, the European Court of
Justice (CJEU) on Wednesday debated whether website hyperlinks to
content which infringes copyright laws should be permitted.
The court heard
arguments regarding the GS Media case, in which a popular Dutch blog site
posted links to leaked photos on a separate file hosting site.
Arguing the central role hyperlinks play in the digital environment, the Computer & Communications
Industry Association (CCIA) wrote that linking to content freely available online should
be legal and was already ruled on by the court in earlier cases.
“If this capacity
to link is put in doubt, the web would lose its universality and power,” the
CCIA wrote. “The most important information medium of our time would be hobbled.”
The EU’s assault
on hyperlinks was not without warning.
Last November, European Parliament member Julia Reda
said the “European Commission is preparing a frontal attack on the hyperlink,
the basic building block of the Internet as we know it,” and warned the
commission’s decision to “break the Internet” could also affect American
websites linking to European content.
“From a practical
standpoint, this law would affect any news aggregator linking to and excerpting
works from European content sources, not just EU based aggregators,” Reda wrote
late last year.
“Each weblink
would become a legal landmine and would allow press publishers to hold every
single actor on the Internet liable,” said Reda.
According to the
Disruptive Competition Project, the outcome of the GS Media case could affect
“every web user” and place absurd burdens on content publishers.
“If the CJEU rules
that every web user, in Europe and beyond, is expected to verify the copyright status of every item on a page before linking to
that page, it could effectively destroy the web as we know it today,” write
Matt Schruers And Jakob Kucharczyk for Project-Disco.org.
“Would you have to
repeatedly check back on the sites you link to, in case the content on the site
you linked to has changed? Would you need to confirm that their licenses are
all paid in full? Would you also have to verify the copyright status of links
on the pages that you’re linking to?”
“If any of this
were the case,” Schruers and Kucharczyk write, “social media, search, blogs,
comment sections, online journalism could be faced with unmanageable legal
liability.”
Meanwhile in the
US, Internet pioneer and popular news aggregator Matt Drudge exclusively told Infowars last October that copyright laws which
prevent websites from linking to news stories were being debated.
“I had a Supreme
Court Justice tell me it’s over for me,” said Drudge. “They’ve got the votes
now to enforce copyright law, you’re out of there. They’re going to make it so
you can’t even use headlines.”
“To have a Supreme
Court Justice say to me it’s over, they’ve got the votes, which means time is
limited,” he said.
“That will end
(it) for me – fine – I’ve had a hell of a run,” said Drudge.
http://www.infowars.com/highest-eu-court-considers-criminalizing-website-hyperlinks/
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