Am I reading this right? If someone embeds an image of someone else's tweet on the forum, they may be guilty of copyright infringement ?



A federal court ruled Thursday that embedding tweets in articles may qualify as copyright infringement, making offenders open to prosecution, Torrent Freak reports.

Justin Goldman filed a lawsuit against Breitbart, Time, Vox and Yahoo for embedding tweets containing a photo Goldman took of New England Patriots Quarterback Tom Brady. Goldman posted the photo on Snapchat, and it eventually worked its way into tweets that the news organizations embedded in articles.

Embedding tweets is commonplace in online news and blogs. The media companies defended embedding tweets by arguing since the image was not saved on their servers, the companies did not commit copyright infringement. While their facts are right, the photo was saved on Twitter’s servers, Forrest said the outlets still committed a misdemeanor posting tweets of the photo in their articles.

“[The media companies’] actions violated plaintiff’s exclusive display right,” U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest ruled in court documents. “The fact that the image was hosted on a server owned and operated by an unrelated third party (Twitter) does not shield them from this result.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation slammed the ruling.

“Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page,” the EFF wrote in a statement. “The logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability.”



http://dailycaller.com/2018/02...weets-a-misdemeanor/

quote:

Originally posted by olfuzzy:
Am I reading this right? If someone embeds an image of someone else's tweet on the forum, they may be guilty of copyright infringement ?

Could they be guilty? Sure. Would they be? Very unlikely.

This case was about a photo that a person took and posted on Snapchat. Someone took that snapchat photo and tweeted it. The news orgs then linked to that tweet.

All past rulings have protected such usage under the Fair Use doctrine and it was based on the server that hosted the photo. In other words, if the news orgs didn't actually download and host the photo, it was OK to use, because embedding is basically pointing to another source. If a person puts something on twitter it's pretty much fair game. However in this case, the person never intended for it to be on twitter and made the case that it was supposed to be private.

I would assume this will be appealed and it's likely to be overturned based on precedent. And I'm not a lawyer and didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night - this is pure speculation based on my limited understanding of the laws on copyright.

In other words, 'tweeting' something doesn't turn something from copyrighted into copyright free. No reason why it would or should.

Think of Twitter as a next-gen copy machine/fax machine rolled into one, if that helps.

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I agree with the Judge on this, when I was a professional photographer while in college I absolutely would expect news organizations to pay me for my photos.

In this case, I think Breitbart, Time, Vox, and Yahoo all owe the owner of the photo for the use of their work.

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If this curbs the lazy 'reporting a tweet' that clogs up real news, I'm all for it.
Reporters should have to think about their sources, rather than just copy/pasting from their social media feeds.

quote:

Originally posted by snidera:
If this curbs the lazy 'reporting a tweet' that clogs up real news, I'm all for it.
Reporters should have to think about their sources, rather than just copy/pasting from their social media feeds.

^^ THIS ^^

I’m all for ending this lazy and annoying practice. [OMG] I disn’t believe it until TwitterDouchebag69 said so in under 160 characters. [/OMG]

These last two sentences are what's confusing me.

“The logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability.”

quote:

Originally posted by sleepla8er:
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I agree with the Judge on this, when I was a professional photographer while in college I absolutely would expect news organizations to pay me for my photos.

In this case, I think Breitbart, Time, Vox, and Yahoo all owe the owner of the photo for the use of their work.

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After a quick search, it looks like the photo was indeed from a journalist/photographer, I assume for professional reasons. I don’t know if there is some sort of copyright statement posted on his Snapchat account, but I agree professionals should be able to protect their work.

I can't imagine anyone on a forum could get in trouble since it is not being posted for commercial gain. New orgs are embedding tweets to generate content which makes them money.

I agree with the judge 100%.