What happened:
A dispute arose in Germany between Bestwater International (a water filtering company) and two independant commercial agents who worked for Bestwater’s competitor. A video which Bestwater held the copyright to was uploaded online by a third party without Bestwater’s permission. The independant commercial agents embedded this video onto their personal website. Bestwater alleged that this embedment constituted copyright infringement.
The Law:
EU law on copyright is covered by the copyright directive. The directive is silent on the matter of whether an embedment could be considered a copyright infringement.
The directive requires that an infringement of copyright includes a communication of the material to a public. The court’s decision stated that an embedment of the video does not (by itself) meet this requirement. The court’s reasoning was essentially that the relevant work is not communicated to a new public and not using a technical means different from that used in the original communication.
The law in the United Kingdom before this decision was somewhat uncertain. The leading authority in domestic law is the case of Paramount Home Entertainment International Ltd v British Sky Broadcasting Ltd. The case here was concerned with whether film studios were entitled to have an injunctions enforced on the major internet providers. The injunction was successful thus the internet providers were required to essentially block out many websites that infringed their copyrights, including websites that uploaded and hotlinked to copyrighted content. The court did leave the question of whether a simple hotlink itself could be considered a copyright infringement open.
What this means:
In many ways this case answers the question left open in Paramount. As it stands it looks like merely hot linking and embedding is not enough to constitute a copyright infringement. While in theory the courts reasoning is understandable, in practice this may prove to be a detriment to the copyright holders.
It is not outside the realm of possibility that the hosts of websites that link and embed copyright content are someway connected with the uploading of the material. Of course if this was the situation it would be rather difficult to prove it. Thus we may continue to see an abundance of websites that link and embed videos and music uploaded illegally to a third party video source.
Source:
http://torrentfreak.com/embedding-copyright-infringement-eu-court-rules-141025/
