Alongside EU-based search engines, digital storytellers (and, thus, Pararchive) can breathe easy following the EU Court of Justice’s recent ruling that sharing links and embedding content that is already publicly accessible does not breach copyright.  The ruling stated that:

“It must be observed that making available the works concerned by means of a clickable link, such as that in the main proceedings, does not lead to the works in question being communicated to a new public. The public targeted by the initial communication consisted of all potential visitors to the site concerned, since, given that access to the works on that site was not subject to any restrictive measures, all internet users could therefore have free access to them. Therefore, since there is no new public, the authorisation of the copyright holders is not required.”

For more on the case, see Gareth Halfacree’s recent article for bit-tech.net.

This ruling follows Judge Posner’s 2012 comments on behalf of the unanimous three-judge Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals panel that the embedding (and viewing) of (even copyrighted) videos does not constitute copyright infringement.  For more on this significant US ruling see Mike Masnick’s Tech Dirt article.