MAGYAR JETI ZRT v. HUNGARY JUDGMENT - SEPARATE OPINION
33
non-compliance with a domestic court order declaring such content
unlawful and prohibiting its use, the journalist can be said to have
deliberately contravened the ethics of responsible journalism and acted in
bad faith31.
18. The Court accepts that in exceptional cases there may also be
liability in a situation of constructive knowledge (“could reasonably have
known”)32. For the assessment of constructive knowledge, the Court uses
the due diligence obligations of responsible journalism which are based on
the rules of ethics of journalism33. It can be said that a journalist could
reasonably have known of the defamatory or otherwise unlawful content of
the hyperlinked message where he or she did not respect the ethics of
journalism and did not comply with the due diligence obligations of
responsible journalism. Any lower subjective standard for liability would
inevitably lead to self-censorship.
19. Finally, liability must be assessed by reference to the specific facts
of the case rather than on a strict, blanket basis. Any regime of objective or
strict liability for the use of hyperlinks is per se contrary to the
above-mentioned Convention principles34. It could result in an infinite
regress of liability whereby authors could be held liable for content on
websites that may be accessed through a sequence of hyperlinks beginning
with the author’s website. This is not a merely hypothetical scenario, as this
case shows.
without having obtained any license or permission of the copyright holders, the act of
linking cannot by itself facilitate commission of infringement. As such, it shall not be
deemed as aiding and abetting an act of copyright infringement” (Decision 2012
DO13748).
http://eng.scourt.go.kr/eng/supreme/decisions/NewDecisionsView.work?seq=934&pageInd
ex=1&mode=6&searchWord=).
31 Paragraph 28 of the judgment. This standard was also established by the Supreme Court
of India in the landmark judgment of Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, where the court
ruled that Internet intermediaries should not be required to exercise their own judgment as
to whether content was unlawful and that the “actual knowledge” standard of liability could
only be triggered after a party received knowledge through the medium of a court order or a
notification from the appropriate government agency acting under the law ((2015) 5 SCC 1,
at paragraphs 138-140, 180, 181).
32 Paragraph 77 of the judgment. The exceptional character of this subjective ground for
liability is made clear in the Court’s reasoning, when paragraph 80 states that “[t]he Court
would not rule out the possibility that, in certain particular constellations of circumstances,
…”.
33 This is also the case in the traditional print and audiovisual media, since the Court
acknowledges that journalists should be protected even in cases where they publish
information that is subsequently revealed to be inaccurate, so long as they have made
sufficient efforts to confirm the veracity of the information at the time (see Polanco Torres
and Movilla Polanco v. Spain, no. 34147/06, §§ 49-52, 21 September 2010).
34 Paragraph 84 of the judgment.