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by blktiger 3730 days ago
It sounded to me like the latter as well. I think the Advocate General is saying you can't ban hyperlinks unless they are the only way to access a copyrighted work.

As an example, I would think a link that allowed someone to get around the requirements to login to view something (maybe username/password as query parameters or something?) would be considered illegal.

2 comments

There was also the comment about being freely available already. So a page behind username / password would not be freely available and you would be breaking the law.

Now, if a user on a private page, marked something as public, but did not publish the link, then it would be legal as you could argue that its freely available.*

* Not a lawyer, so just my own understanding.

I read it more that if the GreenStijl website which was in the EU jurisdiction was posting the links to the pages hosted on a computer within another jurisdiction, but that the pages were not generally available (ie they weren't being hosted on an actual website where they were part of that that website) then GreenStijl would be liable for copyright infringement because the only way to access the published content would be through them.

so GreenStijl can't just host the pages anonymously on mega.com and link to them.. in that case they would deemed to be part of their website.