A Dutch court has held that placing embedded links on a website without permission from the author of the linked content is copyright infringement (an embedded link allows a visitor to a website to view content on an external site, such as a YouTube video, without having to go to that site). Interestingly, the court's ruling plagiarizes a blog post by Douwe Linders, an attorney at Netherlands IP boutique SOLV Advocaten. The offending text, which was lifted word-for-word from the blog post and, ahem, embedded into the opinion without quotation marks or any mention of its provenance, reads: "In case law and legal literature it is generally held that an embedded link constitutes a publication. After all, the material can be viewed or heard within the context of the website of those who placed the link, and placement causes the material to reach a new audience." You would think that judges who come down on the side of authors would follow the don't-plagiarize rule they learned as kids.
Now, in the United States at least, plagiarism and copyright infringement are not the same. The U.S. Copyright Office's fair use factsheet includes "quotations of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations" among its examples of fair uses. However, actually using quotation marks and attributing the source of the quoted text would strengthen the fair use argument. After all, Mr. Linders' words "can be viewed or heard within the context of the [opinion], and placement causes the material to reach a new audience."
(via 24 oranges)
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2 comments:
but how are you sure that they didn't have written or verbal consent to copy the passage from the blog? just because they haven't explicitly said so (or published as much) doesn't mean the permission doesn't exist does it? I mean I'm all for track backs, hyperlinks, and as a photographer, I'm certainly adamant about credit (thanks by the way!) - but I still had to ask...
also - your opinion on the OBAMA Weatherproof and OISHI ads was great! thank you!
Berette you are right; just because the judges didn't explicitly say so, doesn't mean that they didn't have the blogger's permission. I re-wrote the post a little bit to make it clearer that I'm more interested in the irony of the court's plagiarism than the question of infringement. Whether or not there was infringement, it is a fact that the court's opinion plagiarizes the blog by passing off the attorney's words as the court's creation. I find it ironic that the court simultaneously ruled in favor of authors and plagiarized an author. But to answer your specific question, it seems from the story on the 24 oranges blog (my source for this story) that the judges did not ask the blogger's permission.
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