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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: 5, Insightful) by stormreaver on Sunday February 18 2018, @01:54PM (1 child)
You seem to misunderstand how the Web works. You put images out on a public medium, but somehow expect the public to not be able to access them?
Have you considered visibly watermarking your publicly accessible images? Have you considered putting your images on a public image server, so your bandwidth isn't used for public access? Have you considered not publishing the images you don't want the public to have?
The judge also misunderstands how the Internet works, and this decision is idiotic.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday February 20 2018, @03:58AM
That's not entirely true.
Just because I host a public service on the Internet does not make it legal to, for example, DDoS me. Digital attacks can result in civil or criminal liability, even if it's hard to enforce.
Businesses sometimes offer parking only to customers. While enforcement can be difficult, you can be sued for using that parking without being a customer, even if it's "public".
Common law is a great invention because it offers a way to plug legal loopholes like this. While it may not be explicitly illegal to do many antisocial things, such as hotlinking, a judge can always hand you a big fat NO, like with this case.
I don't think it has been done yet, but adding some sort of terms and conditions to HTTP/S would be very useful; it would solve both hotlinking and ad blocking from a legal point of view. If a website does not want people to block ads, they can list that users are required to request ads in their terms (and I can block their site). If I don't want others to hotlink my images, I can add that to my terms and if a large website decides to "ignore" it, I can sue the bandwidth fees out of their asses in court.
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