Brussels, 12/02/2014 (Agence Europe) - An important ruling of the Court of Justice of the EU anticipated for this Thursday 13 February (case C-466/12) will state whether a website can, without having to pay copyright, redirect users via a hyperlink to a protected work freely accessible on another website, in this case without the user being aware of having been redirected to this other site.
In the case in the main proceedings, Retriever Sverige, a Swedish company whose website featured clickable links (hyperlinks) redirected its clients, via a hyperlink, to an article freely available on the website of the newspaper Göteborg-Posten, without the authorisation of the journalist in question and without the client clicking on the hyperlink being aware that he or she was being redirected to another website. The Swedish court to which the case was brought asked the Court whether a practice of this kind constitutes an act of public communication in the sense of Directive 2001/29 on the harmonisation of copyright and related rights in the information society.
The Court ruling will make case-law, not just in the field of the protection of content by copyright on the internet or other channels of distribution, but also in other areas, such as abuse of dominant position on the internet, with Google, for example, having recently been accused of putting content from rival search engines online on its specialist search engines without the authorisation of its rivals or the knowledge of the users. (FG/transl.fl)