Tweet Beware of EMBEDDING Copyrighted Info; New U.S. Court Ruling

I'm on my way out but a quick warning of a new court decision handed down yesterday, February 15, 2018 by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Under this ruling, I ask any links in my posts *not* be turned into embeds as of now.

As reported by The Hollywood Reporter today, in what is the best report on the decision that I've read so-far:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-e ... to-1085342

The full decision of the Court is included in the report and can also be downloaded from Scribd.

This needs consideration by the Administrator/Moderator(s) of this board. I posted this message to call attention to the court's decision.

Ken

[Mike Gebert]

Well, this is a curious case and not one, I think, that has much to do with life here just yet. I understand the concern about stealing photos that appear on Twitter, which is sort of the equivalent of poaching a Pulitzer Prize winning photo by running a photo of it in the newspaper. There was a case where a photographer took portraits of the murderer Richard Speck, and then someone else did a story on Speck and snapped a photo of the photo, and the original photographer I believe took them to court or at least made hay about demanding proper credit.

But embedding here is usually videos from sites that explicitly offer embedding as a function (and generally have a way to allow the user to turn off that ability as well). I would not get too worried about that just yet.

[silentfilm]

I've noticed lately that a lot of news organizations (usually not the big ones) embed tweets from people involved or only commenting on the story. Many times they include a photo or video from Twitter.

If you made a post on Nitrateville, and embedded a photo from an online news story or blog, then the court ruling would apply there. YouTube and Vimeo do not own the videos that they host. The whole reason to post a video there is to get others to watch them and share them. Sharing a video off the TCM website might apply, as they own the copyright to their films, but I believe that they allow videos to be embedded into other websites. (Not a complete film, of course.)

I've noticed lately that a lot of news organizations (usually not the big ones) embed tweets from people involved or only commenting on the story. Many times they include a photo or video from Twitter.

If you made a post on Nitrateville, and embedded a photo from an online news story or blog, then the court ruling would apply there. YouTube and Vimeo do not own the videos that they host. The whole reason to post a video there is to get others to watch them and share them. Sharing a video off the TCM website might apply, as they own the copyright to their films, but I believe that they allow videos to be embedded into other websites. (Not a complete film, of course.)

On youtube, at least, the uploader can choose whether embedding is allowed or not. So I imagine a legitimate uploader wouldn't really have much cause to complain on that score.

Given the possiblility that various Youtube uploads were put there without the permission of the copyright holders, Youtube would have no authority to grant anyone the right to embed the copyrighted images it doesn't own that are not in the Public Domain, potentially, even if previous court-decisions have held otherwise.

For years now, when I've had questions about whether an image is, or images are copyrighted, I simply do not post embeds. I used to post to a board whose moderator converted any link he could to an embed. At that board, for such situations, I would post "Embedding Prohibited."

It usually worked until the day it didn't. So after that, I stopped posting even links at that board.

I'm a plaintiff in the extraordinary 'You Members of the Electronic Database Class Action Copyright-Infringement Lawsuit Won the Case; the Money is There, but You Won't be Paid Until Years After You're Dead' litigation. The payouts keep getting delayed and delayed and then delayed some more...I value my own copyrights and I'd be one huge hypocrite not to respect the valid copyrights of others...

A number of the defendents in this new embedding litigation are major players, such as Time Inc, Yahoo, the Gannett Company...

It's a legal decision worth taking note of.

Ken