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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.
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?
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.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I am a photographer so have a pretty good grasp of how copyright applies to my images - or is supposed to at least.
Implications and whether or not current copyright law is fit for purpose aside, legislation under the Berne Convention is pretty clear: unauthorised reproduction that does not comply with any explicitly granted permissions of use is a breach of copyright, and that applies to code under the GPL and Creative Commons (amongst licenses) as well as traditional publications, photographs, audio, video and so on. In the case of a photograph, then the copyright belongs to the photographer in the first case, and their agency/publisher only if they have agreed to transfer the rights - if anyone else re-uses that image without express permission, then they have breached the copyright.
Now, if you want to try and assign responsibility for an image embedded in a tweet (or any other form of online post), it's going to get messy however you slice it. Copyright is all about controling others ability to reproduce the data, and the owner of the copyright putting some data into a public forum like Twitter or whatever does not change that right. Publishing a book puts the text into a public forum, yet you can't arbitrarily decide to OCR it and publish your own version of the book without any fear or legal repercussion, for instance. So, unless there is an explicit granting of a license to retweet an image, by doing so - technically - you are going to be in breach of copyright, not Twitter. At best, Twitter can be accused of helping to facilitiate that infringement and perhaps not taking sufficient steps (quite what those might be, however... asking for an affirmative consent to retweet, blocking all image retweets?) to prevent it, only far too many people turn a blind eye to this because retweets = higher profile = (hopefully!) profit. This is why such services often try to cut through the whole mess by including a clause in their ToS/EULA that grants them - as a platform - the right to reproduce the content at will within the confines of that platform; take an image from Twitter and post it elsewhere, and that is no longer Twitter's problem if the copyright owner decides to sue. And that's before you consider the issue of fair use; a snippet of a larger text is one thing, an image is (usually) the entire work, so where do you draw the line for something in the public interest, just how do you define public interest, and should that be any different to a random picture of whatever?
There's a lot of scary implications for both the operators and users of online services here, whichever way any potential legislative ruling might decide to view this kind of thing. While we tend to prefer things to be nice and clear cut with a clear demarcation line separating black from white, in this instance I think it might actually be better for the majority of people on all sides to just leave things in a grey area and rely on the spirit of the law and likely intent as the decider in any legal action that might be undertaken.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Mod this up +5 +65 +life of the author
Nothing posted to
Images uploaded to social media are provided under a non-exclusive agreement that the platform can copy and display it within their own framework. That framework extends to embedding because it's part of the structure.
That the original uploader didn't have the right to upload it isn't (or shouldn't be, given this case) on Twitter or any other platform. It's on the person that uploaded it. To require social media--or any other distribution platform--to confirm rights prior to accepting a submission would end every hosted service, not just social media. Web hosting providers could no longer safely operate due to the risk that their customers might upload some content to which they don't have rights.
The DMCA has plenty of flaws, but the safe harbor provision is a cornerstone of how the web works.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.