Source: https://www.jipitec.eu/issues/jipitec-5-3-2014/4098
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 20:00:49+00:00

Document:
Digital technologies, online communications and electronic commerce have destabilized the global copyright system. The 1996 WIPO Internet Treaties – World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty (WCT)  and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT)  – were an early response to this sea change, which subsequently triggered a wave of even further-reaching implementation actions, both nationally and in other venues.
The state of the political economy and geopolitical compromises during the negotiation of the WIPO Internet Treaties, however, made the agreements that were adopted fairly agnostic about certain details and deferred some of the hard questions to member states’ law-makers who were tasked with implementing the treaties.  While the desire for certainty in international intellectual property (IP) law is understandable, especially for rights holders, leaving the resolution of complex or controversial questions to domestic law-makers and allowing the tailoring of law to economic conditions, technological developments and local priorities may ultimately be preferable to locking in premature or possibly ill-conceived international IP norms. Some eighteen years after the WIPO Internet Treaties were signed, this article looks more carefully at their implementation and interpretation in the EU. It examines one particular, and arguably less thematized, subset of rights and looks at the European law and practice of “making available” as a mode of communication to the public. The specific focus is on the recent case of Svensson v. Retriever AB,  brought before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) as a preliminary ruling with regard to making available via hyperlinking, which clarified some of the critical issues in this context.
There is no doubt that international law forms an important part of the context in which courts interpret and apply national legislation. In this sense, before turning to the specific case study, a look at the origins and contents of the WIPO Internet Treaties’ provisions is essential – first, so as to understand their basic structure and flexibility, and second, to contextualize the evolution of the copyright regime and its incessant, albeit not necessarily successful, struggle to cope with the digital challenge.
Scholarly literature offers extensive coverage of the WIPO Internet Treaties, their implementation and overall effect on the conditions for creativity in the digital networked environment, paying particular attention to the introduction of technological protection measures (TPMs) and the ban on circumventing such measures, which may, in effect, have limited the scope of fair use in digital media.  One change, however, has received comparatively less academic attention – that is, the expansion of copyright to cover merely “making available”, as opposed to copying or transmitting works and other subject matter.
Making available is mentioned in two separate articles of the WCT – Articles 6 and 8.
The agreed statements accompanying Article 6 clarify that it applies, at a minimum, to copies that can be circulated as tangible objects. However, nothing prevents countries from applying the right of distribution also to intangible copies, as an additional and/or alternative means of providing authors the exclusive right to authorize the making available of their works.  The WPPT provides for similar protection of performers and record makers in Articles 10 and 14, respectively – under different headings, “Right of Making Available of Fixed Performances” and “Right of Making Available of Phonograms”.
The following section looks at the case law of the CJEU on the qualification of communication to the public in general, and then pays particular attention to the long-awaited judgment in the Case C-466/12, Nils Svensson and others v. Retriever AB. This allows us to put the entire development of the EU case law on the topic into perspective, and to sketch out the potentially far-reaching repercussions for digital copyright law.
Upon this basis, the CJEU has over the years sought to delineate the boundaries of the right of communication to the public and to establish a coherent interpretation across the Member States’ jurisdictions. Interestingly, prior to Svensson, it had not encountered a case that dealt directly with the question of whether hyperlinking constitutes a communication to the public in the sense of Article 3 of the Information Society Directive; a number of other cases have nonetheless dealt with communication to the public through other technological means. In the following section, we summarize the court’s practice and, in this sense, also explain the jurisprudential context of Svensson.
Despite the evolution of the EU case law with regard to the scope of communication to the public, there was no clear-cut template applicable to all situations. It was, for instance, unclear how the different criteria that the CJEU has come up with related to each other,  and, even more critically for our discussion, how the test applies to hyperlinking, and whether hyperlinking qualifies as the copyright-relevant act of communication to the public. The academic discourse pending the decision of Svensson has been intense and often controversial. The European Copyright Society (ECS), which brings together renowned scholars to discuss and critically evaluate developments in EU copyright in an effort to promote the public interest, took the opportunity offered by Svensson to advise the Court on its legal classification of hyperlinking.  In particular, it suggested, based on the existing case law (but before TV Catchup), that hyperlinking should not be qualified as a communication to the public because (i) there is no transmission involved; (ii) even if transmission is not necessary for there to be a “communication”, the rights of the copyright owner apply only to communication “of the work”, and whatever a hyperlink provides, it is not “of a work”; and (iii) the “new public” requirement is not fulfilled.
The claimants, Nils Svensson and a few other Swedish journalists, had written articles for a Swedish newspaper (Göteborgs-Posten) that published them in print, as well as made them available on the newspaper’s website. Retriever Sverige AB, the defendant in the case, offers a subscription-based service, whereby customers can access newspaper articles through the provision of a clickable link that directs clients to the third-party source – the original website where the requested content is freely accessible.  Svensson sued Retriever for “equitable remuneration”, arguing that Retriever had made his article available through the search-and-alert functions on its website. This, he maintained, falls within the copyright relevant acts of either communication to the public or the public performance of a work, neither for which he had given consent. Retriever denied any liability to pay equitable remuneration. Retriever’s basic argument was that the linking mechanisms do not constitute copyright-relevant acts, and therefore no infringement of copyright law occurred. The Swedish District Court rejected the claimants’ application. The applicants in the main proceeding then brought an appeal against the judgment of the District Court before the Swedish Court of Appeal, which referred the case for a preliminary ruling to the CJEU asking for a clarification on the interpretation of Article 3 of the Information Society Directive.
The Court did apply the test as developed in the case law, so far, and went through the different criteria of “act of communication” of a work and the communication of that work to a “public” that must be “new public”.  Following on from SGAE,  the Court found that for there to be an “act of communication”, it is sufficient, in particular, that a work is made available to a public in such a way that the persons forming that public may access it, irrespective of whether they avail themselves of that opportunity.  In this sense, the Court found that in the case before it, “the provision of clickable links to protected works must be considered to be ‘making available’ and, therefore, an ‘act of communication’”.  It then went on to examine the criterion of “public” and while finding that the requirements of “an indeterminate number of potential recipients and […] a fairly large number of persons” were satisfied,  it firmly stated that there needs to be a “new public,” too.
The case will be different, however, where a clickable link makes it possible for users of the site on which that link appears to circumvent restrictions put in place by the site on which the protected work appears in order to restrict public access to that work to the latter site’s subscribers only. Then, the link constitutes an intervention without which those users would not be able to access the works transmitted, and all of those users must be deemed a “new public”. The Court stated that the copyright holders’ authorization would be required for such a communication to the public.  This is the case, in particular, where the work is no longer available to the public on the site on which it was initially communicated or if it is henceforth available on that site only to a restricted public, while being accessible on another Internet site without the copyright holders’ authorization.
Finally, the court addressed the fourth question asked by the Swedish Court: namely, whether it is possible for a Member State to give wider protection to authors’ exclusive rights by enabling “communication to the public” to cover a greater range of acts than those provided for in Article 3(1). The Court ruled in the negative – EU Member States cannot deviate and extend the scope of protection for copyright holders further by broadening the concept of “communication to the public” to include a wider range of activities than those referred to in Article 3 of the Information Society Directive.  The Court weighted, in particular, the perils of legislative differences and legal uncertainty that would have triggered, while leaving aside the broader but certainly underlying questions of balancing between private and public interests and allowing for creativity in the digital space.
The preliminary ruling of the CJEU in C-466/12, Svensson v Retriever AB, addressed the question of whether hyperlinking constitutes communication to the public and what sort of copyright liability it triggers. It clarified the scope of Article 3(1) of the Information Society Directive, which fully harmonizes “communication to the public,” thus also making clear how Article 8 WCT is to be implemented and interpreted throughout the EU. The judgment has made an important contribution to achieving a higher level of legal certainty, particularly against the backdrop of the rather fuzzy and, at times, unsettled practice of the CJEU with regard to communication to the public through other technological means, and the emerging national cases. The “new public” criterion appeared critical in the court’s assessment. The finding that Svensson does not satisfy it permitted hyperlinking as a copyright-irrelevant act to operate as it presently does. In broader terms, this outcome accommodates both the essential functions of the Internet as a network of networks in the technical sense, as well as its function as a comprehensive cognitive database with substantial societal implications.
In the latter sense, the “permission to link” granted through Svensson is by no means trivial despite the relatively straightforward facts of the case. It enables future innovation on the Internet, which is not excessively focused on copyright holders. It is in this sense evident that, although an important goal of resolving copyright issues is to protect right holders, courts also need to take into account the overall sustainability of the digital environment and protect broader public interests. Enhancing creativity in this sense may no longer mean ensuring absolute authorial control over digital content. Rather, creativity may increasingly require flexible systems that embrace hybrid collaborative modes and the new modes of peer production that characterize the networked information economy.  The drafters of the WIPO Internet Treaties discussed the possibilities that digital technologies might offer, but could not have been fully aware of all the deep societal effects of the Internet. For that reason, and very fortunately, the Treaties leave room for purposive interpretation, flexible implementation and sensible application.
Svensson is an affirmative reaction and an intimation as to how this may work. Its importance as a precedent has only been augmented by the more recently decided case of BestWater.  Similarly to Svensson, the latter stemmed from a request for a preliminary ruling, this time from the German Federal Court (Bundesgerichtshof), and concerned the interpretation of Article 3(1) of the Information Society Directive. The essential question asked was: “Does the embedding, within one’s own website, of another person’s work made available to the public on a third-party website […] constitute communication to the public within the meaning of Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29/EC, even where that other person’s work is not thereby communicated to a new public and the communication of the work does not use a specific technical means which differs from that of the original communication?”.  Or, to put it in layman’s terms, the question was whether we can embed videos available on other websites, such as YouTube, on our own websites. The facts of the case were slightly more complicated than those behind Svensson, and related to a dispute between a water filtering company, BestWater International, and two commercial agents working for a competitor. They had embedded a short advertising video on their website that was produced by BestWater but uploaded on YouTube, seemingly without BestWater’s consent. BestWater claimed copyright infringement and asked for the removal of the video as well as for compensation.  After the video was taken down, the questions of the compensation and the trial costs remained relevant and the first and second instances decided them differently – the first court to the benefit of the BestWater, while the second to the benefit of the two agents, Mebes and Potsch (while distributing the trial costs between the parties).  BestWater took the case to the highest court, Bundesgerichtshof, and it referred the key “embedding” question to the CJEU.
In this sense, one could say that Svensson has already been tested and its argumentation seems to hold. On the other hand, despite the substantially increased legal certainty, there are still a number of questions open and we should not be fooled into believing that the relationship between copyright liability and Internet links in EU law has been settled once and for all.
In addition, the “new public” criterion may be controversial as it may, in effect, instruct source website owners to install a paywall or other type of restricted access that would mean that any further hyperlinking happens to a “new public”.  Also, as Ginsburg suggests, with the wider spread of aggregators, which in essence function as automated information generators,  the link aggregator may not be providing access to a public that would not otherwise have had access, but as a practical matter is increasing access for those members of the public who may otherwise have had difficulty finding the source websites. In this sense, she rightly asks whether the viewers of the aggregated content should not be considered as a “new public”.  Numerous further questions with regard to advertising, remuneration, competition, and other types of embedded hyperlinks are as yet unanswered, and we are likely to see a more complex and nuanced case law emerging post-Svensson, as BestWater already proves.  For now, the permission to link remains.
 WIPO Copyright Treaty, 20 December 1996, WIPO Publication No. 226, (1997) 36 ILM 65, entered into force 6 March 2002 [hereinafter WCT].
 WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, 20 December 1996, WIPO Publication No. 227, (1997) 36 ILM 76, entered into force 20 May 2002 [hereinafter WPPT].
 R. L. Okediji, “The Regulation of Creativity under the WIPO Internet Treaties”, Fordham Law Review 77:5 (2009), pp. 2379–2410.
 Case C-466/12, Nils Svensson, Sten Sjögren, Madelaine Sahlman, Pia Gadd v Retriever Sverige AB, Judgment of the Court of 13 February 2014, OJ (2014) C 93/12 [nyr].
 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, 9 September 1886, revised at Paris, 24 July 1971 and as amended 28 September 1979, 828 U.N.T.S. 221. Article 20 of the Berne Convention allows its member states to enter into copyright agreements if “such agreements grant to authors more extensive rights than those granted by the Convention, or contain other provisions not contrary to [the] Convention”. See Article 1(1) WCT; also Okediji, supra note , at pp. 2387–2392.
 WCT, Preamble, at para. 2.
 See e.g. Y. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); J. Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
 See e.g. N. W. Netanel, ‘Why Has Copyright Expanded? Analysis and Critique’ in F. Macmillan (ed), New Directions in Copyright Law: Vol. 6 (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2007), pp. 3–34; D. J. Halbert, The State of Copyright: The Complex Relationships of Cultural Creation in a Globalized World (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014).
 WCT, Preamble, at para. 5.
 Okediji, supra note , at p. 2381.
 Pub. L. No. 105-304, 112 Stat. 2860 (Oct. 28, 1998) [hereinafter the DMCA].
 Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society,  OJ L 167/10 [hereinafter the Information Society Directive].
 See e.g. U. Gasser, Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World: International Supplement (Cambridge, MA: Berkman Center for Internet and Society, 2005); A. Abdel Latif, “From Consensus to Controversy: The WIPO Internet Treaties and Lessons for Intellectual Property Norm Setting in the Digital Age”, in M. Burri and T. Cottier (eds.), Trade Governance in the Digital Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 367–395.
 See e.g. Okediji, supra note ; P. K. Yu (ed), Intellectual Property and Information Wealth: Issues and Practices in the Digital Age, Vol: 4, International Intellectual Property Law and Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007); N. Lucchi, Digital Media and Intellectual Property: Management of Rights and Consumer Protection in a Comparative Analysis (Berlin: Springer, 2006).
 L. Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); J. Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); I. Brown and C. T. Marsden, Regulating Code: Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
 See e.g. S. Fitzpatrick, “Copyright Imbalance: US and Australian Responses to the WIPO Digital Copyright Treaty”, European Intellectual Property Review 22:5 (2000), pp. 214–228; M. Ficsor, The Law of Copyright and the Internet: The 1996 WIPO Treaties, Their Interpretation and Implementation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); J. Reinbothe and S. von Lewinski, The WIPO Treaties 1996: The WIPO Copyright Treaty and The WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, Commentary and Legal Analysis (London: Butterworths LexisNexis, 2002); J. Ginsburg, “The (New?) Right of Making Available to the Public”, in D. Vaver and L. Bentley (eds), Intellectual Property in the New Millennium: Essays in Honour of William R. Cornish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 234–247; A. Christie and E. Dias, “The New Right of Communication in Australia”, Sydney Law Review 27 (2005), pp. 237–262; D. Fewer, “Making Available: Existential Inquiries”, in M. Geist (ed), In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2005), pp. 267–284; D. Carson, “Making the Making Available Right Available”, Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts 33 (2010), pp. 135–164.
 Ficsor, ibid., at pp. 499–500.
 J. de Beer and M. Burri, “Transatlantic Copyright Comparisons: Making Available via Hyperlinks in the European Union and Canada”, European Intellectual Property Review 2 (2014), pp. 95–105 (emphasis in the original).
 De Beer and Burri, ibid.
 Sociedad General de Autores y Editores de España (SGAE) v Rafael Hoteles SA, CJEU, Case C-306/05,  ECR I-11519 [SGAE].
 Ibid., at para. 47, also in reference to Recital 27 of the Information Society Directive.
 Ibid., at para. 54. Similar conclusions have been reached in other cases: in Organismos Sillogikis Diacheirisis Dimiourgon Theatrikon ki Optikoakoustikon Ergon v Divani Acropolis Hotel and Tourism AE, CJEU, Case C-136/09,  ECR I-37 [OSDDTOE], the CJEU said that a hotel owner who installs TV sets in hotel rooms that are connected to an antenna undertakes an act of communication to the public; in Phonographic Performance (Ireland) v Ireland, CJEU, Case 162/10,  ECR I-0000 [Phonographic Performance (Ireland)], the same applied for a hotel operator who provided televisions and radios to which it distributed a broadcast signal, or other apparatus and phonograms in physical or digital form, which may be played on or heard from such apparatus. While the first case fell under the Information Society Directive, the second was under the Rental and Lending Directive 2006/115/EC. Also, in Football Association Premier League v QC Leisure, the Court held that the transmission of the broadcast works through a TV screen and speakers to the customers in a public house is covered by “communication to the public” (Joined cases Football Association Premier League v QC Leisure, Case C-403/08, and Karen Murphy v Media Protection Services, Case C-429/08,  ECR I-0000 [Football League and Karen Murphy]).
 Società Consortile Fonografici (SCF) v Marco Del Corso Case, C-135/10,  ECR I-0000, at paras 90 et seq [SCF].
 Graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices using images rather than text commands.
 Bezpecnostní Softwarová Asociace v Ministerstvo Kultury, Case C-393/09,  ECR I-13971 [BSA].
 The Court said that Article 3(1) “is inspired by Article 8 of the WCT, the wording of which it reproduces almost verbatim” in SCF, supra note , at para. 72. The Court therefore considers Article 8 WCT as guidance on defining “communication to the public”. See SGAE, supra note , at para. 35; Peek & Cloppenburg KG v Cassina SpA, Case C-456/06,  ECR I-2731, at para 31; SCF, supra note , at paras 51–55.
 Joined cases Football League and Karen Murphy, supra note , at para. 193.
 Information Society Directive, at Recital 23 (emphasis added).
 ITV Broadcasting Ltd & 6 Ors v TV Catchup, Case C-607/11,  ECR I-0000, at paras 43 and 46 respectively [TV Catchup].
 SGAE, supra note , at paras 38–39.
 TV Catchup, supra note 31, at para. 34.
 SGAE, supra note , at para. 40; see also OSDDTOE, supra note , at para. 38.
 Football Association and Karen Murphy, supra note , at para. 197; referring also to SGAE, supra note , at paras 40, 42, and OSDDTOE, supra note , at para. 38.
 SGAE, supra note , at paras 41–42; Joined cases Airfield and Canal Digitaal v Belgische Vereniging van Auteurs, Componisten en Uitgevers CVBA (Sabam), C-431/09, and Airfield NV v Agicoa Belgium BVBA, C-432/09,  ECR I-0000 [Airfield], at para. 79; Football Association and Karen Murphy, supra note , at paras 98–99.
 Airfield, ibid., at para. 79. The case was decided under Satellite and Cable Directive (Council Directive 93/83/EEC of 27 September 1993 on the coordination of certain rules concerning copyright and rights related to copyright applicable to satellite broadcasting and cable retransmission (OJ 1993 L 248/15). It concerned situations where the supplier of a digital satellite television service does not transmit its own programme but either receives the programme-carrying signals from a broadcasting station or instructs a broadcaster to transmit programme-carrying signals to a satellite from which they are beamed to subscribers to the digital television services. The CJEU decided that even indirect transmission requires authorization, unless the right holders have agreed beforehand with the broadcasting organization that the protected works will also be communicated to the public through that provider, and when the provider does not make those works accessible to a new public.
 TV Catchup, supra note 31. TV Catchup (TVC) operates an online platform that retransmits intercepted terrestrial and satellite TV channels, enabling subscribers to watch “near-live” television on their computers, tablets, mobile phones and other devices. TVC’s service is funded by advertising before the live stream is viewed, as well as by “in-skin advertising”. Several UK commercial broadcasters (including ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) brought proceedings before the English High Court contending that the streaming of their broadcasts is an unauthorised “communication to the public”. The High Court took the view that it was not clear from previous CJEU case law that there was a “communication to the public” under circumstances such as this where works are streamed to subscribers who are already entitled to access the original broadcast signals via TVs in their own homes, and referred this question to the CJEU. The English Court also asked whether it made a difference to the CJEU’s response if subscribers were only allowed a one-to-one connection to the TVC server, and whether the fact that TVC was acting in direct competition with the commercial broadcasters, both in terms of viewers and advertising revenues, should have any effect on the decision.
 Ibid., at para. 39; see also paras 24–26.
 Streamlining the practice in this regard after a somewhat different opinion expressed by Advocate General Kokott in the Football Association case, where she found that the FAPL’s copyright in the broadcast of live football matches had been exhausted. See joined cases Football Association and Karen Murphy, supra note , for the opinion of AG Kokott at para. 200.
 A. Kur and T. Dreier, European Intellectual Property Law: Text, Cases and Materials (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2013), at p. 299.
 European Copyright Society, “Opinion on the Reference to the CJEU in Case C-466/12 Svensson” (15 February 2013), also published as L. Bently, E. Derclaye, G. Dinwoodie, T. Dreier, S. Dusollier, C. Geiger, J. Griffiths, R. Hilty, P. B. Hugenholtz, M-C. Janssens, M. Kretschmer, A. Metzger, A. Peukert, M. Ricolfi, M. Senftleben, A. Strowel, M. Vivant, R. Xalabarder, “The Reference to the CJEU in Case C-466/12 Svensson”, Cambridge University Legal Studies Research Paper 6 (2013) [hereinafter ECS, “Opinion”].
 See e.g. J. Litman, Digital Copyright (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001), at p. 183; T. Aplin, Copyright Law in the Digital Society: The Challenges of Multimedia (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005), at p. 151; L. Bently and B. Sherman, Intellectual Property Law, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) at p. 151.
 ECS, “Opinion”, supra note , at pp. 10–11, citing Perfect 10 v Google, 487 F (3d) 701 (9th Cir 2007).
 Ibid., at pp. 8–9, citing Crookes v Newton, 2011 SCC 47,  3 SCR 269, at paras 26, 30.
 ALAI, Report and Opinion on the Making Available and Communication to the Public in the Internet Environment – Focus on Linking Techniques on the Internet, adopted unanimously by the Executive Committee, 16 September 2013.
 ALAI, ibid. (emphasis in the original).
 ALAI, ibid, at p. 9.
 ALAI, ibid., at p. 10.
 A. Ohly, “Economic Rights”, in E. Derclaye (ed), Research Handbook on the Future of EU Copyright (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009), pp. 212–241.
 See e.g. Brein v Techno Design  ECDR 21 (Netherlands); Universal Music v Cooper  FCAFC 187 (Full Federal Court of Australia); Napster.no  IIC 120 (Norway). See also Ohly, ibid.
 ECS, “Opinion”, supra note , at p. 2.
 Ibid., at pp. 9–10, excerpting from Paperboy, Case I ZR 259/00 (17 July 2003),  ECDR (7) 67, 77: “The Information Society Directive […] has not changed the assessment of hyperlinks, as are in question here, under copyright law ... According to Art. 3(1) of the Information Society Directive Member States are obliged to provide authors with the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit any communication to the public of their works, including the making available to the public of their works in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and a time individually chosen by them. This provision refers to the use of works in their communication to the public. The setting of hyperlinks is not a communication in this sense; it enables neither the (further) keeping available of the work nor the on-demand transmission of the work to the user”.
 Ibid., at p. 10, citing Tono et al v Frank Allan Bruvik d/b/a Napster, (2006) IIC 120 (Supreme Court of Norway, 27 January 2005).
 See also similarly, Amsterdam Court of Appeal, 15 June 2006, BREIN v. Techno Design,  ECDR 21.
 Stephen Vousden, “Case C-466/12, Svensson – Hyperlinks and Communicating Works to the Public” (20 January 2013), available at http://eulawradar.com/case-c-46612-svensson-hyperlinks-and-communicating-works-to-the-public/ .
 The defendant’s website had a hyperlink that directed users to a website in Australia. The Australian website had a set of copyright-protected photographs – a series of nudes of a person who appears on Dutch television.
3. When making the assessment under question 1, should any distinction be drawn between a case where the work, after the user has clicked on the link, is shown on another website and one where the work, after the user has clicked on the link, is shown in such a way as to give the impression that it is appearing on the same website?
 It should be noted that Retriever’s customers needed to log in to the website. Upon search, customers were then provided with a list of hyperlinks to relevant articles. Clicking on a hyperlink opened a new window, which showed the article’s text as retrieved from the websites of third parties.
 Svensson, at paras 16, 24.
 SGAE, supra note , at para. 43.
 Svensson, at para. 24, by analogy to SGAE, supra note , at paras 40, 42, and OSDDTOE, supra note , at para. 39.
 This has been relevant for a later case, Case C-348/13, BestWater International Request for a preliminary ruling from the Bundesgerichtshof (Germany) lodged on 25 June 2013 – BestWater International GmbH v Michael Mebes, Stefan Potsch, OJ (2013) C 325/8; see next section below.
 Svensson, at paras 33–41, 42(2).
 See e.g. Benkler, supra note ; also J. E. Cohen, “Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory”, UC Davis Law Review 40 (2007), pp. 1151–1205; J. E. Cohen, “The Place of the User in Copyright Law”, Fordham Law Review 74 (2005), pp. 347–374; Y. Benkler and H. Nissenbaum, “Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue”, Journal of Political Philosophy 14:4 (2006), pp. 394–419.
 Bestwater judgment, supra note , at para. 6.
 Ibid., at paras 7 and 8.
 Ibid., at para. 19 (author’s own translation). In the original: “...dass die Einbettung eines auf einer Website öffentlich zugänglichen geschützten Werkes in eine andere Website mittels eines Links unter Verwendung der Framing-Technik, wie sie im Ausgangsverfahren in Frage steht, allein keine öffentliche Wiedergabe im Sinne von Art. 3 Abs. 1 der Richtlinie 2001/29 darstellt, soweit das betreffende Werk weder für ein neues Publikum noch nach einem speziellen technischen Verfahren wiedergegeben wird, das sich von demjenigen der ursprünglichen Wiedergabe unterscheidet“.
 Bestwater judgment, supra note , at para. 15.
 Ibid., at paras 17 and 18.
 Ibid., at para. 18 (author’s own translation). In the original: “Denn sofern und soweit dieses Werk auf der Website, auf die der Internetlink verweist, frei zugänglich ist, ist davon auszugehen, dass die Inhaber des Urheberrechts, als sie diese Wiedergabe erlaubt haben, an alle Internetnutzer als Publikum gedacht haben”.
 See also ECS, “Opinion”, supra note .
 J. C. Ginsburg, “Hyperlinking and Infringement: The CJEU Decides (sort of)”, The Media Institute Blog Post, 17 March 2014, at http://www.mediainstitute.org/IPI/2014/031714.php . In the concrete case of Svensson too, the national court will need to follow up and determine on remand whether the journalists’ articles were on the source websites with the journalists’ authorization, as this appears to be somewhat disputed. If the journalists had already invited the general public to view their articles without restriction, the “new public” criterion would not be met.
Mira Burri, Permission to Link: Making Available via Hyperlinks in the European Union after Svensson, 5 (2014) JIPITEC 245 para 1.

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