ES – Spanish court rules that links to p2p content are legal: “(EDRI-gram)
A civil court in Barcelona has recently ruled against SGAE (the Spanish collective society of authors and editors) in a case brought against Jesus Guerra who was administrating a site with links to P2P content. SGAE accused Guerra of infringing copyrights by having reproduced and communicated to the public works owned by their constituency. The defendant argued that his website was a non-profit site only providing links that could be used by users only through eMule, a P2P application, to connect to other Internet users. No content was actually hosted on that specific website. The judge ruled in favour of the defendant arguing that linking ‘does not suppose distributing, reproducing or making publicly available copyrighted works.’ In the judge’s opinion, the creation of an index of links is not an infringing practice as linking is an integrant part of the Internet.

(Via QuickLinks Update.)