Victory: Court, Using a New Test, Rules Embedding Links is Legal
Courts have for two decades found that linking and embedding someone else’s web content, be it a photo, music, or an article, doesn’t violate copyright law–the entity that controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work, not the user or website that merely directs others to it, is directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing. News publisher Emmerich Newspapers sought to convince…
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled in favor of linking and embedding copyrighted web content, dismissing a new test that would have held aggregators liable. News publisher Emmerich Newspapers had argued that an aggregator website indirectly infringed by hosting links to its copyrighted articles. EFF, along with other organizations, filed a brief urging the court to reject this theory.
The court decided to focus on the entity responsible for transmitting the content rather than the server that hosts it. By applying this test, the court found that linking to copyrighted content does not involve transmitting or communicating the content itself. The decision maintains the common practice of embedding links as lawful while emphasizing that the responsibility lies with the content's actual host.
Written by urgent.news from EFF Deeplinks's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
