Embedded Video and Copyright Infringement

Quoted from: Citizen Media Law Project

This is significant because an important recent case from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Perfect 10 v. Google Inc., held that Google Image's in-line linking of copyrighted photographic images posted on third-party websites did not constitute direct copyright infringement of the plaintiff's display or distribution rights because no copies of the plaintiff's photographic images were stored on Google's computers.

The court wrote:

Google does not, however, display a copy of full-size infringing photographic images for purposes of the Copyright Act when Google frames in-line linked images that appear on a user's computer screen. Because Google's computers do not store the photographic images, Google does not have a copy of the images for purposes of the Copyright Act. In other words, Google does not have any "material objects . . . in which a work is fixed . . . and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated" and thus cannot communicate a copy.

The court went on to conclude that HTML instructions do not themselves cause infringing images to appear on a user's computer screen because the HTML instructions merely convey an address to the user's browser, which itself must then interact with the server that stores the infringing image. Accordingly, the mere provision of HTML instructions, in the view of the 9th Circuit, does not create a basis for direct copyright infringement liability.