Ran across this article today and, given how often we embed tweets in here, figured this would be worth bringing to everyone's attention.
Federal judge rules that embedded tweets can represent copyright infringement
The ruling was made in a case where Justin Goldman accused publications including Breitbart, Time, Yahoo, Vox Media and the Boston Globe of violating his copyright by embedding into their stories tweets with his photo of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Goldman had posted the photo to Snapchat, but it went viral and other users subsequently uploaded it to Twitter.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the photo in question was a picture of Brady, Boston Celtics general manager Danny Ainge and others, and it was used in stories about whether Brady might help the Celtics recruit Kevin Durant.
The publishers had asked for a summary judgment in this case, based on what's known as the "server test" — where the liability for copyright infringement is determined by whether an image is hosted on the publisher's server, or if the publisher just embedded or linked to an image that's hosted elsewhere.
Very interesting language in there. I would think that this will likely be thrown out, but given the updates that Google recently made with locking down image searching based on pressure by Getty and now this, it certainly seems like the internet is about to become far more litigeous than we've ever seen before. Something like this could have massive ramifications to social media and internet communities such as Reddit and other forums like TKP. Suddenly, Joe could be held financially liable for the rights to every tweet and image that is posted in here. At least that's how it reads to me.
Comments
The way I read this was it was a photo that was then embedded in an tweet. But embedding something someone tweeted themselves would be different right?
To me it reads that the hubbub is about the use of the photo (without "permission") and not the tweets themselves
As long as it's still legal to @ Quin Blanding, I'll be happy.
Pls don't ever @ QB again.
We've discussed image attribution on the site before, but back then I think it more applied to original topics than commenters' posts. I remember figuring out how to make the tiny italicized type under a few of my submissions.
I'm actually surprised Twitter doesn't own everything posted to its site
If only I knew how to twit
Joe wouldn't be impacted unless he grabs some content from someone (say VT athletics dept) and then posts it off his server. And they in turn take issue with that. Even then there likely is some measure of cease and desist notification prior to litigation, as in when you see content removed by original entity on youtube or something (like the IOC on all Olympics foottage not from approved channels).
Nothing posted by any of us would be an issue for him because he isn't publishing our content.
Also this was just a dismissal of summary judgement motion to dismiss the case outright. Still interesting to see where this goes.
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