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LEGISLATION

Embedded videos

are legal, states the

European Court

of Justice

The European Court of Justice recently decided that the In this case, the owner of the copyright was thinking
embedding of a protected work in a web page by embed- about all users already when releasing the video public-
ding - also called framing - in any event, constitutes no ly on the Internet.
copyright infringement, if the protected work has previ-
ously been made accessible by the copyright owner in The significance of the judgment
the public domain.
The recent decision of the European Court of Justice
In other words, since embedding videos (e.g. from has initially triggered positive reactions and seen as a
YouTube) is not a discrete way of usage, the court de- general permission of the so-called "embedding". By
cided that it is not considering it as an infringement of now, however, there are growing voices that recom-
copyright. mend not to just act on the assumption of a general
permit. In addition, unfortunately, the decision of the
The plaintiff was a manufacturer of water filters that had Court of Justice is in some points somewhat unclear
uploaded a video on YouTube, which the competition and ambiguous.
included on their homepage. The company eventually
sued for copyright infringement on grounds that only the Although in the present case it was disputed whether
author has the right to make the video public. the video was entitled to be put on YouTube, the court
justifies its decision several times with a reference to a
Around one and a half years ago, the Federal Supreme previous publication authorized by the copyright owner.
Court gave the case to the European Court of Justice Exactly that is what makes it unclear whether it is a
and since then the judgment has been awaited eagerly, copyright violation or not, if the protected work has nev-
since it has a major impact on the handling of all kinds of er been made freely available online by the copyright
“embedded content”. owner.

The reasons for the judgment Nevertheless, the decision provides a degree of legal
certainty. In any case, if the user can be sure that the
A communication to the public, in terms of the guidelines, linked or embedded "source" has been released with
is existent only if a protected work would be using a tech- the permission of the copyright owner, a copyright in-
nological process that is different from the method used fringement cannot be assumed, especially if no other
so far, or reproduced for a new audience, the European technical process of dissemination is offered and there-
Court of Justice defined. A new audience means in this fore no "new" audience - for example, by bypassing a
case a group of people, which the copyright owner did login process – has been opened up.
not have in mind at the original publication of the work on
the net. For the user, however, the uncertainty of not being able
to make sure that the embedded source was actually
In any case, there is no new audience if the work is triggered with the permission of the copyright holder,
freely available on the website referred to on the Internet still remains.◊
link with the permission of the copyright owner.
By MediaBUZZ

36 Asian eMarketing March 2015 - Video Advertising