Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
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: 4, Interesting) by Techwolf on Sunday February 18 2018, @07:20AM (17 children)
Good. This is due to assholes inlining images from my website without permission. I ended up doing a referrer check and denied it if it failed. Inlining images chew up bandwidth that I payed for. Basically, they are freeloaders.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 18 2018, @07:58AM
Why is it good? Sounds like you handled it just fine without government involvement.
(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.)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by chromas on Sunday February 18 2018, @08:17AM (8 children)
If by "good" you mean "bad". Imgur, Twitter and YouTube are set up specifically for deep linking content. If you don't want people linking images from your site, your referer check is the way to go; suing is not. But again, those sites are made to have their content embedded into each other.
(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
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday February 18 2018, @11:34AM
Believe me, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Remember when the Access Hollywood "tape" came out? It got people talking about me. When they went to vote, they remembered my name. And the rest is history.
If you can get your picture, your name, your message out there, that's so valuable. It's called fame. And there are ways to make a tremendous living from it.
If your business depends on people paying to look at your picture, paying to read your message, these are hard times for you. Because we live in the age of Xerox, the age of Fax, the age of Internet. Where somebody presses a button, and your message is everywhere. You didn't get paid, but everybody sees your message. Your picture. It's taken me very far. Very far. But it's a big problem for you. It's not a problem, you think it's a problem. It's a problem because you think it's a problem.
(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.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday February 19 2018, @05:52AM
Those others will politely request the original.
You can politely decline, as you now seem to have worked out.
That's all been part of the protocol since it was first invented - it was designed to be able to work that way.
Of course, their counter to your defence is to simply iframe your page and position it so that the image they want appears in the viewport, which uses even more of your bandwidth. XSRF-like tokens can be used to prevent that, but that makes your individual pages non-linkable, which kinda breaks the web.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday February 18 2018, @04:56PM
I suppose I'm just supposed to know, but I hate it when TFA makes me google basic details. A football player apparently.