Copyright: Hyperlinks And The Communication To The Public Right

The EU's InfoSoc Directive provides for the exclusive right to communicate works to the public. In this blog Deirdre Moynihan looks at how the rules have been applied to hyperlinking.

Article 3 of the EU's Information Society Directive[1] ('InfoSoc Directive') grants to rightsholders the exclusive right to authorize or prohibit any communication to the public of their works. This right and the scope of Article 3 has been the subject of a large number of cases, not all of which are reconcilable.[2] A full overview and analysis of all Article 3 case law is outside the scope of this section; our intention instead is to focus exclusively on the relationship between Article 3 of the InfoSoc Directive and the dissemination of protected works via hyperlinks.