The EU’s highest court this week ruled that one website can link to another without fearing a copyright lawsuit. The ruling, which came in response to a complaint from Swedish journalists, reflects a growing sophistication in Europe about how the internet works, and was hailed with a sigh of relief by legal scholars.

In the ruling, the Court of Justice of the European Union explained that links — like this one about where to watch the Olympics — don’t deprive authors of their right to make their work available to the public. The reason is that the author has made the work public in the first place, and all a link does is act as a pointer to the work. For practical purposes, this means that someone who makes a site about the Olympics doesn’t have to ask my colleague Janko for permission to include that link to his story.