Defamation law can often be found dawdling behind technology, but a barely noticed judgement on hyperlinking may have moved things on a step or two.

A question that remains to be resolved is whether a link to a web page that contains defamatory statements about someone is actionable. The high court's decision in the recent Spectator case looks at the hyperlinking question from another angle. Can the web pages a publisher links to inform the meaning of an article?

The judge's task at this preliminary hearing was to decide whether the words complained about were capable of being understood by readers to refer to Islam Expo, an exhibition organiser; he held that since the Spectator mentioned Islam Expo by name that was clearly possible. However, he also suggested that the pages readers were taken to – via links in the Spectator's piece – should be treated as part of the article when the jury considers, at trial, whether it defamed Islam Expo.

This approach extends the principle for print publications that statements must not be taken out of context. In defamation cases the whole publication is relevant for the purpose of deciding what an article means; it should be read in its entirety, even if it continues on another page, and passages and headlines shouldn't be read in isolation.

As yet authorities on the subject of hyperlinking are few and far between and provide little guidance one way on the other. The case of Hird v Wood, decided more than a century ago, is often cited by legal commentators as applicable by analogy – it featured a man who sat by the side of a road all day smoking a pipe and pointing to a placard on which a defamatory statement was written by an unknown author. The court of appeal decided that this conduct was tantamount to publishing the libel.

The supreme court of British Columbia in Canada, using a different analogy, in a libel case brought by political activist Wayne Crookes, arrived at the converse conclusion. Hyperlinks are like footnotes, it said, they draw attention to other people's content, which readers may ignore and the publisher of the link is not liable for pointing in the direction of defamatory statements.

The Spectator decision shines only a dim light on the question of whether a hyperlink is in itself actionable, but the judgement is significant because it acknowledges that when a defendant publisher has linked to someone else's web pages, that content may be treated as part of the whole publication when it comes to deciding what the words complained about mean.

For that reason the case will be something of a double-edged sword for defendants in future: as likely to be used against publishers as well as by them in libel actions.