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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!)
The term embedded in this context just means a fancy type of hyperlink that displays contents from another site on your webpage. This is exactly equivalent to hotlinking images, and it can be stopped in exactly the same way. Anyhow, hyperlinks are not infringement, so it's obvious by extension that embedded linking isn't infrintement either.
It's probably important to note that embedding a link to a pirated copy of the work doesn't magically make the pirated copy legal.
I think it just means that only the site hosting the pirated work can be charged with copyright infringement. However, I predict this may change in the future when site A links to site B that suddenly "disappears" when the copyright owner tries to hold someone accountable, and then site C later appears with all of site B's stolen content, and site A magically has links to site C (in other words, it's obvious to everyone that the owner of site A also owns site B and C, but nobody can prove it because of some corporate bullshit). At some point, the content owners will manage to collect damages from A, which will set the dangerous precedent that effectively means nobody is allowed to link to an infringing site.
For those kids who got shipped out to the USA for linking videos. If only they had embedded them.
In fact, the same court had already ruled in a earlier case (Svensson) that linking to a file does not constitute copyright infringement either.
The court doesn't seem - at least from this report - to have taken into account that the uploader on YouTube has the ability to permit or deny this embedding, which would have strengthened the argument that it is that uploader who was to blame, not others linking to the video there. I wonder if the copyright owner went after them as well - considering a copyright takedown against the video on YouTube would have disabled the embedded view anyway?
What could be interesting here is how this relates to recent UK court orders forcing the largest UK ISPs to censor access to "pirate" websites like TPB, some of which also merely link to files which may be online in breach of copyright?
In the case of TPB, Swedish court ruled that they did not commit copyright infringement, but aided and encouraged such actions by others, even though no crime could be proven. How that would work out in an EU court is hard to predict.
This is an interesting ruling because, currently in the US, playing a radio station over speakers in a business is copyright infringement. This is very close to the meatspace equivalent of embedding a copyrighted work. Since this is an EU case it obviously would not hold a great deal of weight in a US court (though international rulings are considered in some cases), but it brings up an interesting dissonance in copyright law.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In the embedded scenario the owner retains control. Frankly said owner should simply disallow embedding and let the embedder look like an idiot until they realize what they did.
In the case of TPB, Swedish court ruled that they did not commit copyright infringement, but aided and encouraged such actions by others, even though no crime could be proven. How that would work out in an EU court is hard to predict.
I wouldn't use that as a reference to how a Swedish court would rule in the future either.
The entire TPB case is such a major clusterfuck of retardedness and corruption mixed up.
It is supposed to be illegal for the Ministry of Justice to be involved in specific cases, the officer in charge of the raid was on Warners payroll, the Judge were a member of the same copyright interest group as the Swedish equivalent to RIAA and the prosecutor had just a month before the raid concluded that TPB didn't do anything that broke the law. (But he changed his mind suddenly after being told that TPB had to be taken down.)
Also, one of the softwares brought up as evidence of assisted copyright infringement were the World of Warcraft binaries that Blizzard even encouraged people to share together with the trial-code you got when you purchased a license.
You can't expect a similar situation to occur in all copyright cases.