According to the European Court of Justice, it is legal for websites to link to free content without the copyright holder's permission. The ruling came after a dispute between journalists and a Web company in Sweden over links to the online news articles the latter used.
BBC said in its report that the journalists are employed by Goteborgs-Posten, a Swedish newspaper. The journalists had some of their articles published on the Swedish paper's online site. Retriever Sverige is said to have operated a website that provides links of news articles that are published by other websites.
A Swedish court, said BBC, requested the intervention of an EU court to provide ruling whether Retriever Sverige had broken a copyright law. In the original case, the plaintiffs argued that the users of Retriever Sverige has no idea whether by clicking the links provided, they have been sent to another website. This tactic had made their articles available without authorization, and said that they should be remunerated of this violation.
Although the journalists were not able to win their case in its home courts, an appeal was filed, of which the court handling the appeal requested the EU Court of Justice its decision on whether Retriever Sverige violated the copyright law. BBC said that under the copyright law of the EU, authors have the exclusive right to provide authorization or prohibit any communication to the public of their work. The EU court decided that the law was not broken by Retriever Sverige because the articles in question were published on the website of Goteborgs-Posten, and are therefore classified as freely available.
Clarke Willmott technology lawyer Susan Hall said about the effects of the EU court decision if the regulator decided to hand down a different ruling. She said, "If the decision had gone the other way it would have broken the internet. The way we communicate online is predicated on sharing material, whether that's links to Robert Peston on Bank of England interest rates, decisions of the European court or pictures of otters who look like Benedict Cumberbatch."
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