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A New York federal court has ruled that people can be held liable for copyright infringement if they embed a tweet posted by a third party. The case was filed by Justin Goldman, whose photo of Tom Brady went viral and eventually ended up at several news sites, which embedded these 'infringing' tweets.
Nowadays it's fairly common for blogs and news sites to embed content posted by third parties, ranging from YouTube videos to tweets.
Although these publications don't host the content themselves, they can be held liable for copyright infringement, a New York federal court has ruled.
The case in question was filed by Justin Goldman whose photo of Tom Brady went viral after he posted it on Snapchat. After being reposted on Reddit, it also made its way onto Twitter from where various news organizations picked it up.
Several of these news sites reported on the photo by embedding tweets from others. However, since Goldman never gave permission to display his photo, he went on to sue the likes of Breitbart, Time, Vox and Yahoo, for copyright infringement.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/embedding-a-tweet-can-be-copyright-infringement-court-rules-180216/
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @08:01AM (2 children)
This as about big media freeloading off of the twitterati and redditorai, because those are "free". They laid off their pro photographers and now just steal images all day long. But you could never try it the other way around (quote their article or link to it), big media's lawyers will arrive in black SUVs bearing billy clubs or silenced handguns. This court decision gives the big media a punch on their greedy nose.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Spamalope on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:11PM (1 child)
Yes!
The photographer posted the photo to snapchat, the time limited for yours eyes only website. So that's not an intent to distribute, though if he posted it anywhere without a copyright release it's still only been made available on that site. i.e. If he's got a blog and posts there to drive traffic to his blog, media companies taking it to drive traffic to their commercial site is depriving him of traffic for profit.
Media companies would like to profit from photography as it drives traffic. They decided it'd be cheaper to license photography so they laid off their photographers. Then they decided to 'reduce costs' further by attempting to impose licensing terms that amount to taking ownership as though it were taken by a staff photographer. (Conde Naste is one I saw being mentioned for that) Pro photographers find that unacceptable and don't take the 'deal' (ex: credentialed White House staff photographer or the like, who is working as a day job to provide news coverage photos). I see more and more stories of them simply publishing the photos and then claiming 'I just found it'. They very much know better.
Now FB (and other aggregators) are working to do until their written work what they've done. I can't find anyone to root for. What is sure is that this isn't sustainable, as they're burning everything news publishing to the ground. Something will rise from the ashes, but it's going to look different. One bit that's shaking out now is that excellent editorial commentary is self published on Youtube now. I'm not sure what news coverage of stories that would benefit from photo/video illustration will look like once this shakes out, but it will be supported differently.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 19 2018, @03:01AM
Perhaps instead of 3 minute sound bytes, worthy events will get a small documentary, and unworthy events will be forgotten. (Interesting to note that government interference may not be required here, but men are not angels after all.)
How much clearer and more damning might the events of the Flint water crisis, for example, have been if our exposure to it were in the format of small documentaries waiting until we have time to watch instead of blaring in headlines? I might be suggesting reality shows, but imagine if reality shows were about reality instead of dipshits who are famous for being famous.
For this to work at all, there would need to be some kind of completely independent (of Visa, MasterCard, et al) payment and distribution system. Perhaps cryptocurrencies will get there for payment eventually through gradual evolution (both technical and social). BitTorrent seems mature as a distribution system. (These new documentarians will encourage their works to be freely [as in beer, not necessarily freedom] distributed and live off cyberbegging. In order to work best, sponsorship should be generally shunned. Accept donations from individuals only.)