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EU Court Rules Embedding YouTube Videos Is Not Copyright Infringement
Maurits van der Schee writes "The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that embedding a copyrighted YouTube video in your site is not copyright infringement. From the article: "The case in question was referred to EU’s Court of Justice by a German court. It deals with a dispute between the water filtering company BestWater International and two men who work as independent commercial agents for a competitor. Bestwater accused the men of embedding one of their promotional videos, which was available on YouTube without the company’s permission. The video was embedded on the personal website of the two through a frame, as is usual with YouTube videos. While EU law is clear on most piracy issues, the copyright directive says very little about embedding copyrighted works. The Court of Justice, however, now argues that embedding is not copyright infringement."
The fact that we need a court to decide that "embedding a copyrighted YouTube video in your site is not copyright infringement." is already a failure of the system as a whole.
Next we'll have the court deciding that "Mentioning the fact that you saw a video on YouTube is not copyright infringement as long as you specify you don't know whether the video was copyrighted or otherwise."
(I now wonder if this post is copyright infringement. After all, I'm replying an article about a court ruling about people who embedded in their web pages videos from Youtube which were copyrighted! ... OMG I don't want to die in prison!)