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Wed 18 Apr, 2007 05:27 am
Does linking the following website contents violate copyright law?
YouTubes TOS:
"4. Intellectual Property Rights
The content on the YouTube Website, except all User Submissions (as defined below), including without limitation, the text, software, scripts, graphics, photos, sounds, music, videos, interactive features and the like ("Content") and the trademarks, service marks and logos contained therein ("Marks"), are owned by or licensed to YouTube, subject to copyright and other intellectual property rights under United States and foreign laws and international conventions. Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only and may not be used, copied, reproduced, distributed, transmitted, broadcast, displayed, sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of the respective owners. YouTube reserves all rights not expressly granted in and to the Website and the Content. You agree to not engage in the use, copying, or distribution of any of the Content other than expressly permitted herein, including any use, copying, ordistribution of User Submissions of third parties obtained through the Website for any commercial purposes. If you download or print a copy of the Content for personal use, you must retain all copyright and other proprietary notices contained therein. You agree not to circumvent, disable or otherwise interfere with security related features of the YouTube Website or features that prevent or restrict use or copying of any Content or enforce limitations on use of the YouTube Website or the Content therein."
Copyright law on the Web is still evolving but as it stands right now the best answer is "it depends".
Posting a link that takes you to their site and displays their content is generally NOT a copyright infringment. If you try to imbed their content in your site and try to disguise the fact that it is their's you can run into problems.
Re: Copyright law question?
TTH wrote:Does linking the following website contents violate copyright law?
I doubt it. To my knowledge, no law categorically prohibits deeplinking, and your case does not resemble any of the cases in which courts have ruled against the deep linker. Specifically, you are not claiming to have written YouTube's terms of use yourself, and neither YouTube nor you are trying to make money out of the text that constitutes YouTube's terms of service.
But remember, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I am talking about the USA.
When linking I mean their content. A video on their site to this site. They don't sell that video. It is free to watch. My concern is linking it here for others to see being an issue. I realize some websites are being sued for various reasons now. Not the website only, but the person responsible for the post too.
I know I could just not link it and not worry about it. There is one there I would like to link here to show the other side of a story. That is why I want to do it.
So, Thomas if I get sued I can't blame you.
I am kidding I understand.
I should correct that in linking someone here to their site.
TTH wrote:When linking I mean their content. A video on their site to this site. They don't sell that video. It is free to watch. My concern is linking it here for others to see being an issue. I realize some websites are being sued for various reasons now. Not the website only, but the person responsible for the post too.
If you are linking to the videos, the answer to your question about the law is "I don't know". But in the case of YouTube, it seems to be irrelevant what the law prohibits, because YouTube encourages webmasters to display on their websites small versions of YouTubed videos. The template YouTube offers for this purpose then deep-links to the higher-quality version that's actually on the YouTube server.
Since YouTube actively helps users deep-link to its content, it evidently has no problem with it, so the legal problem doesn't even arise in the first place.
So, Thomas if I get sued I can't blame you.
I am kidding I understand.
fishin wrote:.......Posting a link that takes you to their site and displays their content is generally NOT a copyright infringment......
That is what I was talking about. A link from here to there.
I should correct that in linking someone here to their site.
Thank you I will base my decision and blame you all. No I won't blame you but thank you.
Deeplinking - first time I have heard that term.
Why don't you just send them an e-mail and ask them? It's the easiest way to be safe.
Good idea. I will. Thanks.
If I get a response I will post it here.
Would a search engine like google be breaking any laws with the almost endless data that it provides by supplying specific links to websites?
TTH wrote:Deeplinking - first time I have heard that term.
It's the technical term of what you're trying to do. You may want to google it for more insights into the legal grey zones that some forms of it involve.
Gelisgesti wrote:Would a search engine like google be breaking any laws with the almost endless data that it provides by supplying specific links to websites?
I don't know. For all I know they may contract with certain companies.
I think I just need to be concerned with providing a link from here to there.
If neither party has a probem, then goggle doesn't have a problem.
It just seems that now with the internet new laws are being established.
New territory has to be covered.
Good idea. I still like that term - deeplinking. I will email google and post it if they email me back that way others can at least know.
Gelisgesti wrote:Would a search engine like google be breaking any laws with the almost endless data that it provides by supplying specific links to websites?
It depends, and there's a little background knowledge necessary to understand what it depends on.
The commonly applied technical solution to the problem is that websites have a file called robots.txt on the level right below the homepage. For example, you can find A2K's robots.txt file at
www.able2know.com/robots.txt , and YouTube's at
www.youtube.com/robots.txt , and so forth. This file describes all the pages the webmaster wishes to exclude from deep-linking and webcrawling.
Under common internet customs, well-mannered citizens of the web are expected to leave excluded files alone. Conversely, well-mannered webmasters are expected to explicitly disallow every page they want left alone, and to allow deep-linking and webcrawling on all their other pages. Although the current solution is enforced only through customs, it seems to work pretty well in practice. To my knowledge, America's courts haven't yet spoken about the extent to which they go along with this web convention.
Independent of what the courts say, Google is a well-mannered company that respects the robots.txt convention. So are most other brand name companies in the IT world.
But again, this is only my reasonably informed opinion as someone working in the IT industry. It isn't legal advice.
You just don't want to go down with me. I am only kidding.
I understand, I will check so thank you. It is good to hear that the companies are working together for now. I am sure there is bound to be a
test case. I don't want to be that test case.
Now that is a term I have heard-web crawling, spider and phishing (sp?)
TTH wrote:You just don't want to go down with me. I am only kidding.
No problem. I didn't address my qualifier to you, I addressed it to third parties who might read this.
TTH wrote:Now that is a term I have heard-web crawling, spider and phishing (sp?)
These are very different things. Web-crawling is what web-spiders do. It's a legitimate exploration of the web, certainly as long as spiders observe the robots.txt protocol. Phishing, by contrast, is a form of fraud. It has nothing to do with spiders and web-crawling.
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