Liable for Linking
A Hamburg court just decided that linking to a stolen photo counts as copyright infringement if you make any money from your website. Not the person who actually hosted the stolen image—you, just for pointing to it.
The case was straightforward. A photographer found his work being used without permission, then discovered someone had linked to that page from their own site. The linker never embedded the photo or hosted it. Just a text link pointing at where the image was. That’s apparently enough to be liable.
The court’s reasoning: your website makes money, you link to copyrighted content, you’re guilty of copyright infringement. You don’t have to do anything except link and have revenue. Simple.
Except the part that’s impossible: what counts as making money? The blogger with a hundred euros a month from ads? The YouTuber running their channel like a job? The person sharing links on Facebook from a website that sells something? There’s no threshold. Courts are just going to decide after the fact whether you were profitable enough to be worth suing.
It’s the inevitable result of letting people who don’t use the internet write the laws for it. Taking copyright concepts built for physical goods and applying them to a medium that’s just information and pointers. The whole thing was broken before anyone even tried to follow it.