The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has reportedly said that website owners do not need authorization of the copyright holder to link to freely accessible copyright works on another site.
The court said that even in the case, where it is presumed that the work is appearing on the site that contains the link, it will not account to infringement.
The CJEU advised the Court of Appeal in Svea, Sweden, following a case pitting Swedish journalists against Retriever Sverige, a media monitor and aggregation company that provides access to information from newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, Internet and social media, the PC World reported.
The court said that as the works offered on the site of the Goteborgs-Posten were freely accessible, the users of Retriever Sverige's site must be deemed to be part of the public already taken into account by the journalists at the time the publication of the articles on the Goteborgs-Posten was authorized.
