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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.
Of course news orgs should pay royaltees but should Google and Twitter who do it automatically (no)?
Here is the problem.
Copyrights were made back in the printed press days. In order to violate a copyright law you needed an expensive printing press. That often required a business of printing/publishing material. So the individual copyright violator should be expected to pay large penalty, because if they have the resources to gain access to a printing press, they also have enough resources to understand the law, and they would be part of a small number of people who may be hurting the copyright holder.
However today, it is harder to not break a copyright law then to follow it. Because digital media which is cheap and acceptable by all, is designed to make exact copies and spread them very easily. So we are having 18th century punishment aimed at obvious offenders, hitting individuals who just wanted to share some interesting information, that takes two button presses.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If anyone violated the copyright I would think it was the person who originally tweeted the picture since they distributed a copyrighted image. I understand the argument the judge appears to make that if they display a copyrighted image without permission they are guilty of copyright infringement regardless of who actually hosts the image, I can see why the photographer went after them since they have the money, and would have done much more infringement due to the widespread views, to pay out if they ultimately lose, vs. some random Twitter user.
This is yet another example of how copyright laws need to be updated and clarified for the digital age. In print it was a lot harder to get and use an image and who published it was clear; now you can scope images off the web easily and once someone takes an image it is still available even if the original is no longer available. Another issue is 99.99% of the stuff tweeted or otherwise distributed by users is worthless garbage; so how do you balance protection for artists and keeping the garbage flowing freely?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
. Conservatives derisively refer to judges that do that sort of thing as "activist judges", progressives applaud those judges for "doing the right thing", and the result is at some point the judicial branch will no longer respect its role as a co-equal branch of government and instead think it is superior to the others.
Almost- both ends of the political spectrum get very angry when judges do this when it in the direction they don't like. The right just doesn't label those as "activist judges." Complicating matters even further, the most prominent cases we notice are cases going to the Supreme Court. And the easy cases don't get there which means that generally the cases people notice are the cases that involve vague wording or trying to use very old precedents to understand new technologies, or otherwise somehow unique, and so by nature the justices have substantially less to go on than simply interpreting a narrowly written law.
User A takes a picture. They have a copyright on said picture.
User B shares that picture on social media. This is the first copyright violation. (But is it necessarily User B's fault? Linking to a story/page often automatically includes an image, which is most likely copyrighted).
User C embeds User B's twitter post, on their site, including the infringing content.
Should User C be held liable for the copyright violation, but not User B?
Should User B be held liable for User C's violation?
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, or is it still User B's responsibility, and social media service doesn't give a rat's ass because they're covered under DMCA?
Emphasis mine:
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Remember when you said "the judge should rule on the 'right' thing instead of on the letter of the law and the facts of the matter?" This is the result.
No, I certainly never said that. I don't know anyone who has argued in favor of that. What you're talking about is the "liberal" tendency to oppose "originalists".
The problem is, even being an originalist requires interpretation. How exactly does 18th century copyright law apply to computing? There was no original intention for how it should apply to computing, because computers didn't exist. Absent a new law that is designed to apply to computing, an originalist needs to make a bunch of guesses and interpretations about how that law should apply.
But people who call themselves "originalists" are generally too dim to recognize that. They make arbitrary decisions that fail to recognize context or the subtlety of language. Others are simply dishonest-- they know they're making interpretations, but they're cynically using the concept of "originalism" to justify crappy judgements that suit their own political interests.
So we are having 18th century punishment aimed at obvious offenders, hitting individuals who just wanted to share some interesting information, that takes two button presses.
I wouldn't be so hard on the 18th century.
It's us who won't let Steamboat Willie enter the public domain almost a century after it was created, not them. They understood reasonable copyright terms.
...whatever person posted it to Twitter?
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When you try to share a tweet, Twitter gives you code to embed it on a page. Is Twitter contributing to copyright infringement?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You raise an interesting point. What I don't understand is how independent photographers are supposed to make a living if the large news organizations can use their content for free. It seems like copyright only works for large corporations.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Mod this up +5 +65 +life of the author
Nothing posted to
It depends on if the billboard is classified as a building or an artistic work. Photographs of buildings taken from a public place (e.g. the sidewalk in front of the building) do not infringe the copyright of the architecture, but photographs of works of art would infringe the copyright of the work.
Youtube realizes this. Which is why new channels can't monetize their Youtube videos until after they went viral. (eg. no until until after one week after 1000 subs)
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
I've been complaining about the braking industry's complete lack of empathy in this area for years.
This ruling is a giant step backwards for the modern communication of information. Maybe we need a new kind of court for technical questions of law. We have specialty courts for bankruptcy and specific fields of law, maybe it's time to add a branch for technology and staff it with people who know the difference between embedding a tweet and actual copyright infringement.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The judges who are the most "activist" and actively ignore the wording of the Constitution are conservatives....and people who claim to be originalists, like St. Scalia.
The problem is with copyright law still not being updated and having proper provisions for cases like these that are all too common.
There are two sides to this.
1. It can be frightening to some people the slippery slope that this leads... being sued for embedding a tweet on your blog/website sounds a bit too much, and it shouldn't be allowed. But seeing things like this is just a very very one-sided outlook on the matter. This probably isn't what this case is about;
2. Why do you think big publication websites are being sued on this? Because most likely, they refused to pay the photographer for his work, and instead used the embedded tweet as a workaround to just steal and use his work free of charge. I'm gonna bet that intention was fully estabilished in this case. It's just these publications acting like assholes to exploit the photographer work without paying him. Cases like these have already happened before... in fact, it happens all the time, but in most cases the photographer doesn't have enough money to sue.
If you heard about cases of photographers being fired in masse on media publications, it also has a bit to do with this. Why pay a full time photographer when they can just steal photos online?
The details of the case should estabilish guilt... but I'm betting this is yet another case, like multiple ones I've already read in photography blogs, where the photographer saw the infringement, tried to contact publications about it, they played dumb or outright refused any acknowledgement, and it ended up in court.
And people should know about this: for media publications that will be actively using work of photographers and whatnot, they fully know they can't just yank a photo from the Internet and publish it willy nilly, doesn't matter where it's hosted or by whom. The basis here is that these publications are exploiting the work of photographers without paying for it, while using it to get advertiser or whatever more money for their own profit.
We had extremely debated cases in the past with artists using photography for their own work... I think it was Instagram photos or something to pass as art and reinterpretation, which caused a whole lot of discussion around copyright law, but in cases like media websites it's far more clear cut. As soon as a judge interprets it as intentional usage of photographer work without payment or licensing deal, as a significant part of the article, post, or whatever, they will be in the wrong and have to pay for it.