[JURIST] Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) [official website], Melchior Wathelet, stated [advisory opinion] on Thursday that providing a hyperlink to images without the owner’s consent does not amount to copyright infringement. The case involves a website, GreenStijl, which posted hyperlinks to another website’s unlawfully posted Playboy pictures. Wathelet stated that “hyperlinks which lead, even directly, to protected works do not ‘make available’ those works to a public where the works are already freely accessible” on other websites. More specifically, he claimed that hyperlinks do not constitute a ‘communication to the public’ as defined by Directive 2001/29/EC [text, PDF], which would make the information a copyright infringement. To interpret hyperlinks as such, Wathelet stated, would impair the “functioning of the Internet and…one of the main objectives of [the act], namely the development of the information society in Europe.” He expressed fear that ruling contrary to this interpretation would open up individuals to copyright proceedings and would thus be severely detrimental to the continuing proliferation and exchange of information on the internet.

If the Advocate General’s argument is heeded, the precedent would be an expansion upon previous European and US copyright law. In September of 2014, the EU Court of Justice held [JURIST report] that libraries could make works digital without consent of the copyright holders. In June 2014, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit [official website] held [JURIST report] that searchable book databases constituted fair use and thus did not violate copyright infringement.