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Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement (eff.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability.
This case began when Justin Goldman accused online publications, including Breitbart, Time, Yahoo, Vox Media, and the Boston Globe, of copyright infringement for publishing articles that linked to a photo of NFL star Tom Brady. Goldman took the photo, someone else tweeted it, and the news organizations embedded a link to the tweet in their coverage (the photo was newsworthy because it showed Brady in the Hamptons while the Celtics were trying to recruit Kevin Durant). Goldman said those stories infringe his copyright. "[W]hen defendants caused the embedded Tweets to appear on their websites, their actions violated plaintiff's exclusive display right; the fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (Twitter) does not shield them from this result," Judge Katherine Forrest said.
This case began when Justin Goldman accused online publications, including Breitbart, Time, Yahoo, Vox Media, and the Boston Globe, of copyright infringement for publishing articles that linked to a photo of NFL star Tom Brady. Goldman took the photo, someone else tweeted it, and the news organizations embedded a link to the tweet in their coverage (the photo was newsworthy because it showed Brady in the Hamptons while the Celtics were trying to recruit Kevin Durant). Goldman said those stories infringe his copyright. "[W]hen defendants caused the embedded Tweets to appear on their websites, their actions violated plaintiff's exclusive display right; the fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (Twitter) does not shield them from this result," Judge Katherine Forrest said.
If the social media service (or 3rd party client), when User B shares a link to a page containing the image, automatically adds the image to the post, thus resulting in an inadvertent copyright violation on the user's behalf, should the social media service (or 3rd party client) be held liable,
Hold the social media service liable. Sharing photos should be banned on socialist media sites, since the only purpose of sharing is copyright violation. It's just like torrent sites whose sole purpose is piracy.
Ban all sharing on socialist media! This will also save incredible amounts of bandwidth on the Internet.
So your friend has a cute picture of his cat and can't share it with you. Too bad. If you really want see the damn cat, go visit your friend, instead of committing piracy copyright violations.
All copyrights on pictures belong to the manufacturer of the camera. That's nice and simple.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Mod this up +5 +65 +life of the author
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