In specific cases, the ruling of the European Court of Justice concerns the commercial use of hyperlinks related to circumstances in which website operators have linked to unauthorized content a second time. The effects of the ECJ ruling go beyond individual cases.
The European Court of Justice also deals with the blogger community where links are frequently used, but only when there’s a lot of uncertainty as to whether they are bordering on copyright infringement or not. There have been discussions as to what counts as financial gain when it comes to hyperlinks. The ECJ doesn’t have any general guidelines.
This could be a disaster for blogs since website operators will be less inclined to post links to other websites as they don’t want to go to the trouble of checking the copyright. Bloggers, who don’t make much money with their website content, won’t find the hassle worth their while. If this is the case, the only possibility is to leave the link in question out of the post.
The ECJ judgment was criticized by IT expert, Thomas Stadler, who raised the question of how journalistic websites, which are generally commercialized, should ensure they’re following the ECJ requirements. Instead of making jurisdiction dependent on a case-by-case comparison, which primarily takes into account possible financial gain, he should have taken into account 'those who link specifically to copyright-infringing content as an accomplice or participant of the copyright infringement'.
This article on YouTube copyright explains that the video platform is full of copyright infringement. The material used in the videos themselves might be copyrighted so it’s difficult to know if they are even allowed to be uploaded to the video platform, let alone whether you can link to them in your blog post. It is presumed that the blogger has checked that the content isn’t copyrighted before embedding the video in their post.
It is assumed that the ECJ ruling will lead to a discussion to determine the precise distinction between commercial and non-commercial use of copyrighted works. If the legislature is based on the ECJ ruling and the private use of online content is not motivated by profit, this could provide answers to a number of previously unresolved copyright-related issues.