Newsletter
COPYRIGHT AND INTERNET HYPERLINKS
The Copyright Act defines "reproduction" as direct, indirect, permanent, or temporary repro-duction by printing, reprography, sound re-cording, video recording, photography, written notes, or other means. The Act defines "public transmission" as making available or communi-cating the content of a work to the public through sound or images by wire or wireless network or other means of communication, including ena-bling members of the public to receive the con-tent of a work by any of the above means at a time or place of their own choosing.
The Intellectual Property Office recently issued a legal interpretation addressing the common practice by companies or individuals, when cre-ating Internet websites, of including hyperlinks to pages within another's websites. The IPO stated that if a website operator merely pastes the address of another person's website into its own web page, and creates a hyperlink to enable other persons to access the other website from its own website, this does not involve reproduction and use of another's work, and thus in principle is not likely to infringe on a copyright holder's right of reproduction. However, if a website operator is aware that works within the website that is linked to are pirated or infringe copyright, yet creates a hyperlink, thus providing such works to the public, the website operator may be held to be an accomplice or accessory to infringement of the right of public transmission.