Hyperlinking to unlicensed music infringes copyright: English court
The English High Court has ruled that hyperlinking to radio stations that are not licensed for broadcast in the UK amounts to copyright infringement.
In a highly-anticipated judgment, issued last Friday, November 1 the court said that whether hyperlinking to radio stations constituted infringement hinged on whether the content was licensed for distribution in the UK in the first place.
The case arose after record labels Warner and Sony, who between them dominate the digital music market, sued US audio streaming service TuneIn.
The service provides digital access to more than 100,000 radio stations around the world.
TuneIn marked the first opportunity for the High Court to examine in detail the implications of the CJEU’s landmark decisions in Svensson and GS Media.
According to the High Court’s judgment, UK-licensed radio stations can legally be made available to TuneIn’s UK users.
But the court found TuneIn liable for providing access to non-licensed stations to UK users.
Warner and Sony argued that, by providing access to radio stations playing music, TuneIn was liable for infringing the copyright for those sound recordings.
According to the High Court, TuneIn is an “aggregator” which essentially acts as a “one-stop-shop” for users looking to access digital radio.
Audio streams and aggregators
TuneIn is differentiated from a normal search engine by the fact that it provides links to “audio streams” which engage IP rights, the court said.
The radio streaming service and app had argued that holding so-called aggregators liable for infringement had sweeping implications for publishers’ right to use hyperlinks at all.
But the court highlighted the particularly “persistent nature of the content” that TuneIn linked to.
“In a conventional search engine, once a user has clicked on a link, they go to the new website and the involvement of the search engine is over,” the judgment said.
“That is not how TuneIn’s service works and if it was then TuneIn would not be able to provide its own visual advertisements while the user was listening,” it added.
In the wake of the ruling, TuneIn claimed victory on what it said was the “most important element of the case, which was the right to provide UK users with access to UK-authorised radio stations”.
“We believe the judgment will have very little impact on the company’s revenue and ongoing growth strategies,” the company said.
The vast majority of TuneIn’s listenership access radio stations from their own countries.
TuneIn said it was considering appealing the judgment.
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