Embedding Videos On Your Website- Is It Copyright Infringement?
I always worry when I embed a video I found on YouTube to my blog or website. Am I committing copyright infringement or not? YouTube says its OK, but who knows. Anyone can bring a lawsuit against anyone, and who wants that hassle. Thank heaven we have Nestor and Katerina Gasset to give us the facts about whether we are infringing on someone’s copyright or not.
There is a well known court case. Are you allowed to take videos from a video site such as YouTube and place them on your website?
There are two parts to the answer of this question. One is that YouTube has specific terms of service and use that cover state that by uploading a public video you are giving permission for others to embed that video on their websites. But YouTube is not the only kid on the video block. There are hundreds of video hosting sites. They may not all have the same TOS as YouTube has.
The Flava Works Inc v. Gunter ( MyVidster) court case has been settled by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The court rules that a site that embeds copyrighted videos from another site is not committing copyright infringement.
I know a lot of artists, authors and video producers don't like the sound of that ruling, nonetheless that is the future of copyright and the distribution of content.
The higher court ruled against the lower court who had ruled that this was copyright infringement.
This means that you can go to YouTube and choose videos to embed on your website. You can go to any Video syndication site and do the same thing.
What you can not do is take a copyrighted video from YouTube or any other place and download it to your computer, then put it in your video editing software and create another copy of that video and place that on your website. That is copyright infringement.
I hear agent A who get upset that agent B has embeddd Agent A's video from YouTube on to Agent B's website. The only way around this is to make your videos private which defeats the purpose of getting traffic and prospects to view your videos. I look at it this way, Agent B is linking to Agent A's YouTube Channel which is linking to Agent A's website:) That is a good thing:)
But the reason the court ruled that embedding is not copyright infringement is because when you embed a video on your website you are only really linking back to the original content. You are not touching the data stream so therefore you are not stealing the content.
Both Google and Facebook filed briefs in the court case in support of MyVidster. Their point is that their sites should be treated as intermediaries and not be held liable for what users do with content pertaining to infringement.
MPAA( Motion Pictures Association of America) filed a brief supportive of Flava Works. They asked the higher court to agree with the lower court's decision.
The court had this to say:
“…As long as the visitor makes no copy of the copyrighted video that he is watching, he is not violating the copyright owner’s exclusive right … His bypassing Flava’s pay wall by viewing the uploaded copy is equivalent to stealing a copyrighted book from a bookstore and reading it. That is a bad thing to do (in either case) but it is not copyright infringement.”
The court ruling also protects us who embed video on our sites from being charged with copyright infringement even if that video was originally in copyright violation. The person who first uploaded the copyrighted video on to their YouTube channel is the person guilty of copyright infringement.
Nestor Gasset and Katerina Gasset- Realtors®, CIPS, ABR, SFR, GRI, REOS
International Properties & Investments LLCCall us today at 561-753-0135 to get your house sold.
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