>It places an extra burden on the big, commercial sites to remove links (or stop linking on the first place) to content that is considered illegal in the EU.
Why did you insert the word "big" in front of "commercial sites"? There is no such qualification in the court's ruling.
Every small blogger who makes a little money through ads now has an obligation to check whether or not the owner of every single linked page owns the copyrights to the content they publish (or will publish on that page in the future).
I have no idea how anyone could possibly perform these checks. Do you ask the linked site for proof? But if anyone is going to find a way through this legal nightmare it's going to be the very biggest players with big legal departments.
>Every small blogger who makes a little money through ads //
FWIW you don't usually, in copyright, have to make money for a site to be considered commercial. Depriving another entity of the ability to fully profit can be enough, or even advertising something you're not directly profiting from.
> now has an obligation to check whether or not the owner of every single linked page owns the copyrights
That isn't what the ruling says: you can still assume content is legal. Only when you know (or "should have known") it isn't do you need to unlink it.
In this case, geenstijl.nl (which is a professionally-run news site that likes to troll and stir up anything to get traffic) repeatedly linked to leaked playboy pictures uploaded somewhere on the internet. There was no way they could claim innocence. They expressly and repeatedly decided to link content they knew was illegal and would get them a ton of traffic.
>That isn't what the ruling says: you can still assume content is legal. Only when you know (or "should have known") it isn't do you need to unlink it.
That is simply incorrect. Here's what the ruling says:
When hyperlinks are posted for profit, it may be expected that the person who posted such a link should carry out the checks necessary to ensure that the work concerned is not illegally published.
"Carry out the checks necessary" means that you cannot simply "assume content is legal".
Why did you insert the word "big" in front of "commercial sites"? There is no such qualification in the court's ruling.
Every small blogger who makes a little money through ads now has an obligation to check whether or not the owner of every single linked page owns the copyrights to the content they publish (or will publish on that page in the future).
I have no idea how anyone could possibly perform these checks. Do you ask the linked site for proof? But if anyone is going to find a way through this legal nightmare it's going to be the very biggest players with big legal departments.