Embedding Isn't Copyright Infringement, Says Italian Court (arstechnica.co.uk)

The appeal court of Rome has overturned one of the 152 website blocks another court imposed last month, and ruled that embedding does not constitute a copyright infringement. From an ArsTechnica report: The order against the Italian site Kisstube is annulled, but the other websites remain blocked. Kisstube is a YouTube channel, which also exists as a standalone website that does not host any content itself, linking instead to YouTube. Both the channel and website arrange content by categories for the convenience of users. The Italian court's decision was informed by an important ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). In the BestWater case, the CJEU held that embedding or framing a video or image from another website is not copyright infringement if the latter is already accessible to the general public. However, another CJEU judgment ruled that posting hyperlinks to pirated copies of material is only legal provided it is done without knowledge that they are unauthorised versions, and it is not carried out for financial gain.

Comments

iframe

[zifn4b]

Is this really just about the semantics of an iframe? An iframe is like another separate browser window only placed in a more specific location in the browser's window area. You basically just say this particular rectangular region of another web page should render the content at . It's not even technically embedding. Embedding would indicate you have embedded the actual content into your site which is not even the case in an iframe. Is there going to be a separate followup argument regarding popups then? Modal dialogs? Sheesh.

This quite frankly is an argument that only people who don't understand technology would ever insist on having because it's irrational. Insisting that putting an iframe in a website pointing to another URL is embedding is like claiming hyperlinks are embedding, it's about on par with insisting there are dump trucks driving your data around intertubes and therefore there ought to be a toll on those trucks. Ugh.

Re:iframe

[Anonymous Coward]

Well done getting first post. However in your haste to post, you succeeded in entirely missing the point. No, it's not about the semantics of an iframe. In fact the mechanism by which embedding is achieved is entirely irrelevant to the legality of said embedding.

Re:iframe

[Jaime2]

Since video can't actually be binary embedded into HTML, all websites that present video are simply markup constructs that tell the browser to go get a video. Whether the browser uses the iframe, video, or object tag is what's irrelevant. The question here is how far copyright law goes in limiting other's use of presenting content. Unfortunately, this is destined to come down to intent and to become a gray area that will be expensive to litigate.

Re:iframe

[Wycliffe]

Iframe or hyperlink, the issue is that someone is creating an organized list of infringing items that they have uploaded to youtube. The stuff is not suppose to be on youtube and youtube is supposed to be policing it but youtube is playing whack a mole. If youtube doesn't know where the mole is then most of their users won't either. A 3rd party site can bypass this as they can index it on their side and they don't necessarily have to even name it correctly on youtube's side which makes it even harder for youtube to find it. This is the reason that the media companies have used the courts to go after hyperlinks and iframes. With cloud computing and thousands of sites, it's pretty easy to dump something into an anonymous ftp, dropbox, youtube, amazon instance, etc... that isn't owned by you. You could even store it piecemeal in comments on a wordpress site, etc... It's practically impossible to stop someone from hosting data somewhere but if you can restrict someone from organizing that data then it's not near as useful as there is noway to really find it.

Re:iframe

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason Youtube is 'playing what a mole' is because it is convenient for them.
There is more profit in just letting everything through and only sorting things out when someone complains than it is to manually check everything before allowing people to access it.
If a smaller organization where to start host a couple of dozen videos and didn't check that all of them where OK then that organization would have to pay though the nose.

Re:iframe

[Anonymous Coward]

There is more profit in just letting everything through and only sorting things out when someone complains than it is to manually check everything before allowing people to access it.

An average of 300 hours of video is uploaded to youtube every minute. Explain how it would be in any way practical for youtube to "manually check everything"?

Let's imagine that on average, a person could verify whether some video (or it's accompanying audio) was infringing or not within the runtime of the content (an arbitrary assumption, the necessary research could possibly take less time, or more likely considerably more, especially for short videos, but let's roll with it). So 300 hours of video requires 300 man-hours to verify. There are 1440 minutes per day, so that means we need 432000 man-hours per day to verify the uploads. Assuming workers working 8 hour days, that means we require 54000 workers. Fifty-four thousand full-time workers, just on checking video uploads (I'm not giving them any holidays either). And I'm pretty sure that's a pretty major underestimate. Imagine those workers earn a pretty low $30000, that gives us a wage bill of $1,620,000,000. 1.62 billion US dollars. Are you beginning to get the picture?

Re:iframe

[Anonymous Coward]

"Either pay us half of that to do it for you, or don't allow uploads. Problem solved." - MPAA

Re:iframe

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fuck off" - youtube

Re:iframe

[zifn4b]

But youtube is playing whack a mole.

Welcome to the internet. The game of copyright infringement is indeed a game of whack of mole as it has always been. I fail to see how you or this article is making any progress towards any solution. You're doing an excellent job of defining the problem dare I say whining, but I don't see anyone doing anything productive about the root cause of the problem. There have been many discussions had on slashdot about this issue in many forms and no one that I know of has any solution for copyright infringement that actually works at least in the sense of the goal of 100% prevention.

Here is what I do know though. People who have money will purchase multimedia for a reasonable price. If they don't have money or the price is unreasonable then they will find it somewhere if they want it bad enough. Look I go back a long way. There was a time when copyright infringement was only considered a crime if you profited off of the author's work until the DMCA came along. People have been copying media for decades going all the way back to cassette and VHS tapes. In fact, dual cassette decks were quite popular at one time. Apple even has a music channel entirely devoted to "The Mix Tape" which is no doubt endorsing copyright infringement as it's defined today. Are you going to go whack Apple over the head for supporting that nostalgia?

It's fun to see the same irrational junk on slashdot regarding this issue that has been spewed for as long as I've been on here. Some things never change...

Re:iframe

[Wycliffe]

The media companies are playing a game they can't win. The only thing they can do is move copyright infringement to the gray area where it's more convenient for a percentage of their customers to buy it. I'm surprised torrent link sites haven't moved to tor yet. Tor seems like the perfect place to store links. Tor is too slow for streaming but it would a perfect place to catalog where on youtube you can find the videos a person wants to watch. As currently, it's still legal to watch pirated movies, the only thing that needs to be protected is the cataloguing of where the movies can be found. This seems like an ideal use of Tor.

Re:iframe

[zifn4b]

An average of 300 hours of video is uploaded to youtube every minute. Explain how it would be in any way practical for youtube to "manually check everything"?

Ooh, rational thinking. You're going to make the other person's head explode. You see mandating a 0 tolerance policy for copyright infringement is kind of like the War on Terror/War on Drugs, although terrorism has far more severe consequences. I find this idea of arbitrary expectations especially in America to be quite amusing. It's as if some people when they reach a certain threshold of status or power or something seem to think they possess the capability to say "So it shall be written, so it shall be done" and the masses must make it happen regardless of whether the expectation is reasonable or not.

Here's what I think, do what you can that's reasonable to prevent "bad things" from happening but realize everything in life has risk associated with it and there is no way to alleviate that risk 100% Never has been, never will be no matter how much anyone would like that to be the case. Period. Life has limitations, deal with it.

Re:iframe

[zifn4b]

The media companies are playing a game they can't win.

Anyone remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... It was printed on t-shirts at one time. MPAA/RIAA FAIL.

Re:iframe

[Anonymous Coward]

[img src="example.com/pics/copyrightedimage.tif"]

OH SHIT! Slashdot gunna get SUUUUUUUUUUUED

Re:iframe

[Anonymous Coward]

So 300 hours of video requires 300 man-hours to verify. There are 1440 minutes per day, so that means we need 432000 man-hours per day to verify the uploads. Assuming workers working 8 hour days, that means we require 54000 workers.

YouTube did not become the size it did, or have the bandwidth "burdens" it has, because it played by the rules. You can see similar behavior with Uber.

omg

[Anonymous Coward]

which italian makes a video site without cicciolina videos??? it's like globo site in brazil but without the information relating xuxa and porn.

Re:omg

[Anonymous Coward]

Bunga-bunga!

Re:omg

[Anonymous Coward]

now there is someone I could vote for!

Annoying problem with that...

[mark-t]

Theoretically fine, except for this:

... posting hyperlinks to pirated copies of material is only legal provided it is done without knowledge that they are unauthorized versions

How is a someone who has been taken to court over this but never knew that the content they linked to was infringing supposed to prove that they didn't know that the content was unauthorized?

Or, assuming that they are treated as innocent until proven guilty, how is the court supposed to prove that a person knew that the content they wanted to link to was unauthorized to get a conviction?

While I honestly do admire the apparent theoretical intent of this kind of this law, because there's no way to know what goes on inside anyone else's head, I can't see how this sort of thing can hope to work as its wording might suggest.

Re:Annoying problem with that...

[Gr8Apes]

Theoretically fine, except for this:

... posting hyperlinks to pirated copies of material is only legal provided it is done without knowledge that they are unauthorized versions

How is a someone who has been taken to court over this but never knew that the content they linked to was infringing supposed to prove that they didn't know that the content was unauthorized?

Wrong question - the right question is "how do you know they knew it was infringing?" followed by "prove it".

Or, assuming that they are treated as innocent until proven guilty, how is the court supposed to prove that a person knew that the content they wanted to link to was unauthorized to get a conviction?

Still wrong premise, the court doesn't prove anything, the plaintiff has to prove it. Note that things like emails saying "post this link to blah from pirate site yarr and add this awesome ad so we make money" would likely be considered a smoking gun in this situation.

Re:Annoying problem with that...

[tomhath]

Wrong question - the right question is "how do you know they knew it was infringing?" followed by "prove it".

Because they were sent a take down request and didn't comply.

Re:Annoying problem with that...

[mark-t]

Still wrong premise, the court doesn't prove anything, the plaintiff has to prove it

That depends on whether the defendant is in a civil or criminal case.

Leeching bandwidth.

[HornWumpus]

Unless the web site allows it, it is leeching bandwidth. Admins are well within their rights to configure their servers to not serve the expected graphic file. Even if it did work when the web site author tested it.

Re:Leeching bandwidth.

[Lieutenant_Dan]

That's exactly what I thought when I read the summary; you can just reference page elements from other sites. Been doing the "http_referer" check for a few years on a basically any web site I deploy or work with..

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Embedding isn't copyright infringement"??

What, rationality, operational practicality, and technological awareness? From the court system?? Must be a weird Italian thing!