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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @08:38AM (7 children)
What I'd do is consider it based on the intent of the hosting service. If it's a service that explicitly tries to get people to, or actively enables people to embed content on other sites (youtube, etc.) then there shouldn't be anything for anyone to bitch about. Hotlinking images etc from a site that doesn't try to do that, like someone's personal website or at least privately owned site, shouldn't be ok. If you're going to steal the content just up and download it and rehost it.
I'm surprised anyone likes to hotlink though, particularly for a blog or news story etc given that all the original person has to do is change the filename or directory in the original document and it could result in broken images on the hotlinkers page.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @08:47AM (3 children)
Or swap the named image with a NSFW image.
(Score: 3, Redundant) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:39PM (2 children)
Far better would be using referrer value to pick which image gets returned. Your site? Funny cat picture. Anything else? Goatse.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @01:55PM (1 child)
And get sued by the goatse copyright holder.
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:27PM
It'd be worth paying a small license fee to use it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Sunday February 18 2018, @09:04AM (1 child)
What you say sounds reasonable. In the TFS it sounds like someone else put it on Twitter ("made its way onto Twitter") without his consent, so I'd argue that's where the wrongdoing, if any, occurred rather than at the point of a Tweet being embedded. When it comes to suing, one might be forgiven for assuming it could be a case of considering who are the most lucrative targets or the most easily identified.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 18 2018, @11:24AM
Yeah - but.
Who put it on twitter? Some dummy who doesn't know much about the web, the law, or finances. A private citizen, who probably gained nothing from doing so, other than a sense of satisfaction by making his post. And hardly a lucrative target. That was just people being people.
A business concern, on the other hand, is presumed to be knowledgable of the laws pertaining to the business. In this case, they took a copyrighted image, and grabbed it for profit. That profit motive changes everything.
Suppose you have a flower garden in your front yard. On occasion, someone, oftentimes young girls, grabs one of you flowers. You find it to be annoying, but you can't bring yourself to confront some little girl for filching a flower. You may or may not be an ogre, but you just aren't that much of an ogre. Then, one morning, you look out your window, and your local florist is out there, stealing ALL of your flowers. Don't you think that's an entirely different situation?
Profit changes everything.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday February 19 2018, @05:55AM
That's not what the word "steal" means. Neither of the uses, in fact.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves