You may have read that the European Commission intends to prevent hyperlinks to copyrighted material. The good news is that this isn’t true.

The bad news is that there is a real proposal to change copyright law that could change how we use hyperlinks – the bedrock of the World Wide Web.

According to the leaked draft, copyright holders are concerned about their content being monetised by others, without licensing, through content aggregation. This is where a rights holder or creator releases their own content online, which is then aggregated by a third party, re-packaged and re-sold.

Under the existing interpretation of the right of communication to the public, if a work has been made available online, linking to it does not expose it to new audiences, so the right remains intact and linking is not an infringement. But the commission proposes to overhaul these rules in order to harmonise them across the EU now that some member states have tried to solve this issue on their own.

[theregister.co.uk...]