It's common practice for those of us who make our living on the internet to link out to other websites in the stories we publish -- in fact, we here at Engadget consider it a necessary part of good reporting. In the EU, however, there's been some doubt as to whether such behavior constitutes copyright infringement. Thankfully, today the EU Court of Justice held that, as long as the source itself is freely accessible to the public, such hyperlinks don't run afoul of copyright law.

The salient bit of EU law states that authors hold "the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit any communication to the public of their works." In the case at hand, some Swedish journalists took umbrage with the fact that other websites that were publishing links to their work without permission, and thought those other sites should pay up for the privilege of doing so.