Now Even the Links Are Illegal
Somewhere in a German court, someone decided they understood the internet well enough to issue binding rulings about how it works. The results are always spectacular, and rarely in a good way.
The Hamburg regional court issued a ruling that should make anyone running a blog, YouTube channel, or social media account with any commercial dimension at least mildly queasy. Following an earlier European Court of Justice decision, Hamburg became the first German court to confirm it: linking to a page that contains a stolen image can itself constitute a copyright violation. Not hosting the image. Not embedding it. Just placing a text link on your site that points to another site where the image happens to be sitting.
The original case was simple enough. A photographer found his photo used without permission on a website. A third party had linked to that website. The photographer went after the linker. And the court agreed—the link was a violation, as long as the linker was operating with commercial intent. Which sounds like a narrow condition until you read what commercial intent actually means here: not that you were specifically profiting from that link, but that your website, taken as a whole, has a profit motive. Which covers every blogger with a single affiliate link, every YouTuber with monetization enabled, every shop owner who shares news articles on their Facebook page.
Attorney Dr. Jonas Kahl laid it out plainly: the foundational principle that a link cannot infringe copyright is now gone, at least within this jurisdiction. The implications for how information moves online aren’t small. If you can’t link freely, the connective tissue that makes the web function as something other than sealed silos starts to dissolve.
The practical absurdity is that nobody checks image licensing before dropping a link. You share an article, you share a thread, you share a video—you are not auditing the media rights of every page you point to. The ruling effectively criminalizes a behavior so universal that selective prosecution is the only possible enforcement strategy, which means it stops being a principle and becomes a weapon: deployed when someone with enough resources decides to use it.
Welcome to the internet, as imagined by people who are afraid of it.