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

[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

[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.

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..