Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by msmash on from the making-clear dept.

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.

1 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Re:iframe by Wycliffe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.