Know The Rules – Linking Websites

For many marketers and bloggers an important part of generating value to their audience is by sharing content of others. In this context videos, blog posts and other contents are linked from third party websites to their own web appearance. If you post third party content you may not be responsible for the actual content itself, however you may be held liable if you set a link to a party that hosts the content without the rights to do so.

In the European Union for example, the corresponding European Court of Justice decided in 2016 (C 160/15), that if a company establishes links on their website to a source that may not have the right itself to publish the concerned content, then the linking company can also be held liable for breaching the laws of intellectual property respectively the copyright law. This breach of copyright is also independent of the linking party´s knowledge about the copyright breach.

In case you are linking content of others on your website, make sure that you only use sources that have the right to publish the corresponding content. The best external sources in this case are the original producers of the content concerned.