Court of Appeal of Athens
Decision No 1909/2017 (18th section)
- The provision of art. 3 Law No. 2121/1993 is in line with the acquis communautaire (art. 3 para. 1 Infosoc Directive)
- The provision of hyperlinks towards freely available protected works constitutes act of communication to the public in case that a “new” public is touched, namely a public that has not been taken into account from rightholders, when authorizing the initial communication to the public. The same applies in hyperlinks that use the technical feature of framing.
- In case that the website administrator posts a hyperlink that directs the user to another website, where the protected work is made available to the public without the author’s consent, in order to determine whether this amounts or not to an act of communication to the public in the sense of art. 3 para. 1 [Law 2121/1993], it is to be determined, on a case by case basis, whether the hyperlink provider acted with profit-making intention and he did not know or could not reasonably have known the illegal nature of the publication of this work on that other website or whether, on the contrary, he acted with profit-making intention, a situation in which that knowledge must be presumed.
- The provision of hyperlinks at stake does not amount to an act of communication of protected works to the public since no new public has been touched and the hyperlink provider did not know the unlawful character of the initial transmission and did not had a profit-making purpose.
Keywords: Copyright, communication to the public, hyperlinks, Svensson (C‑466/12), BestWater, (C‑348/13), GS Media (C‑160/15).
Legal provisions: Law 2121/1993 [Greek Copyright Act], art. 3; Directive 2001/29/EC, art. 3 para. 1, Civil Procedure Code, art. 534.
Edited by: Dr Theodoros Chiou, IP lawyer