Why Embedding Content Matters
from the embedding-is-core-to-the-internet dept
Imagine waking up in the morning, grabbing your hot cup of coffee, and scrolling your favorite blog post or website, only to find it looking like this:
Images are missing. Video content is not there. Nothing but an empty black void staring back at you.
This is what could happen if a recent case brought to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Hunley v. Instagram, brings about a change to how content can be shared around the Internet.
Two weeks ago, the Internet Society filed an amicus curiae brief to represent the Internet in this significant court case. This is the first filing from the Internet Society‘s Amicus Program, designed to give the Internet a voice in important court cases.
Through amicus briefs, the Internet Society can draw attention to issues or arguments that the parties involved in a lawsuit are unlikely to raise themselves, helping courts understand the potential impacts of their rulings on the digital world.
In Hunley v. Instagram, several photographers are suing Instagram for copyright infringement, that is, when someone copies content without a license or fair use defense in the United States. Hunley, as the plaintiffs—the ones doing the suing—claim that Instagram is guilty of copyright infringement by allowing others to embed photos on other websites.
They are saying that in addition to grabbing the “embed code”—a short snippet of web code that allows embedding content into another page—website designers and users should also have to negotiate a copyright license to display the embedded content. This would drastically change how we build and use services online.
While this specific case is about embedding images around the web, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could easily make it more difficult to embed anything in other contexts around the Internet, not just the web.
The ability for a content creator to embed code or instructions for others’ web browsers to access images, videos, services, etc., from somewhere else online exemplifies the Internet’s generative and modular capacity. Embedding enables the creation of content that is more accessible to more people. Embedding is found across many different aspects of the Internet, with around 95% of all sites embedding third-party content (source: Web Almanac).
For example, the 9th Circuit Court’s own website embeds videos stored on YouTube servers. Below, you will see two screenshots of a typical oral argument page on the Court’s website, one with and one without embedding. Key features of the website clearly no longer work.
Even emails and Internet-based text message applications frequently embed content from third-party servers. Moreover, website creators may embed code to incorporate enhanced functionality into their websites, for instance, translation functionality, video captions, or CAPTCHA functionality intended to secure websites.
The Internet was built to be built upon, and assembling different components, known as modularity, and ensuring a common set of principles about how systems can be assembled to make new systems, known as generativity, are core aspects of our digital world. Our Internet experience would be a mere shadow of what it is today if we could not embed other content, services, and resources.
Do you believe in defending the Internet as we know it today, with easy access to content? Read the brief we filed, and help spread the word, embedding matters! #EmbeddingMatters
Joseph Lorenzo Hall is the Distinguished Technologist for a Strong Internet at the Internet Society. This post was reposted, with permission, from the Internet Society blog.
Filed Under: copyright, embedding, licensing, linking, server test
Companies: instagram
Comments on “Why Embedding Content Matters”
If a hyperlink is legal, then so is embedding, as what it involves is the page defining a display area, and a link to the content to be displayed. That is the embedding site does not make it own copies, but rather refers the users browser to the publicly available content.
Perhaps embed should not be used as a short hand for follow the provided link and show the contents to the user in this area of the page. While incontinent and clunky, the same could be achieved by showing the link, and fording the user to click it to get the content.
Re:
We disagree on definitions here.
A “link” is meant to be method of obtaining (“fetching”) content stored elsewhere, and for the most part, is also meant as “user interaction is necessary” to view/obtain that content. The word “embed” should be looked at as a “pre-clicked link”, meaning that the site’s author intended for the viewer to see some particular content that is stored elsewhere. Doing so in this manner presents the material in the most effortless manner possible, and should be taken as nothing more than providing a convenience for the viewer.
It really shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the case at bar is nothing more than an attempted money grab, exactly as the dead-tree media are attempting to accomplish.
I'm wondering why all of this isn't rendered moot by Instagram's TOS
The TOS gives Instagram the right to do this:
When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.
Now granted, TOS aren’t always legal or enforceable, but as far as that goes this seems pretty straight forward (famous last words for a non-lawyer).
Re:
That’s a good point, but I have to say, a TOS cannot require a person to forego his/her rights under law. But this does go to mens rea, the state of mind of the poster who signed up. Allegedly, he/she read all of the TOS, and accepted them as “I can live with that”, then went on to post his/her material.
A court will take all of this into account, but it will also (presumably) take into account the actions of general population of that site’s users, and of the actions/viewpoints of users of other, similar sites; to wit: Do users actually read all of the TOS?; Do they adhere to it?; Do they attempt to negotiate any of the terms before “signing up”?; and most importantly, are the terms of the TOS onerous, burdonsome, too obtuse for the average user, and last but certainly the most important, do any of the terms attempt to circumnavigate around a user’s rights under the law(s)?
That last will be the final determining factor. If the user signed up, meaning that they accepted the TOS in full, then they are said to have become party to a contract. The last point is the only point that will overcome the TOS, and from what I’ve seen, the Judge will have several Excedrin headaches trying to read through the entire TOS, before rendering a verdict.
sumgai
Re: Re:
Instagram’s TOS used to include a provision that you are agreeing to allow embedding when you upload video and images.
It was removed a few years ago, Instagram never explained why.
“Imagine waking up in the morning, grabbing your hot cup of coffee, and scrolling your favorite blog post or website, only to find it looking like this:”
That’s my worst nightmare. The lack of dark mode in the image just hurts me.
gettyimages attack again!
They are pulling the reminiscent move that gettyimages attacked google’s view image button, and another search engine bing for it’s photo tool
Fucking. Use. Robots.txt. or. HTCaccess. To. Block. it.
Them asking a license to merely display images via linking and not storing is basically link tax but for any site rather than primarily search engines, a business model that demands license to simply point to their content.
There shouldn’t be a copyright harm for viewing your image on your site, vs viewing your image elsewhere coming from the same source.
Imagine artists on twitter who have their copyrighted images on there suing a front end site nitter. Yes the images have its own URL but that still doesn’t mean they have it stored on their servers. Any post deleted no longer appears on nitter, since Nitter is practically the middle man or a proxy that loads stuff from twitter, remove junk out of it, then loads that onto the user’s browser. You might as well go after VPNs. Might as well go after any proxy sites, acting nothing more than a passthrough.
P.S. Techdirt, add “Link tax” as a tag on this article.
Re:
“Fucking. Use. Robots.txt. or. HTCaccess. To. Block. it.”
But, then, they lose all that sweet revenue!
The trick here is to not fall for their nonsense claims, and understand what it really is. They want to be paid twice. They want money from the traffic sent to them via the link/embed, and they want to also get a share of whatever the originating party gets for providing it.
Their refusal to use the free, easy and long-established tools to block traffic only doesn’t make sense if you buy into their excuses. Once you realise it’s all nonsense and they actually just want to be paid multiple times for the same content, it becomes very clear.
Today I learned: Federal Court videos, work products of the federal government, are not public domain, and need a license fee to embed in other sites.
Re:
And you might already know, but court records in general are public domain yet require fees to access from PACER.
Don’t want your content embedded? Upload it to a site that doesn’t embed.
Fixed forever
The only winning move is not to play
I don’t think this will end up how they want it to even if they win. If users/sites are forced into the position of ‘if you want to show our stuff via embeds then you need to agree to be bound by a license’ then I suspect that a majority of people/sites will simply stop doing that, chalking it up as too much hassle when they could simply go with content where the creator has made clear that they’re not short-sighted greedy fools by allowing embeds.
If they think copyright infringement is bad wait until no-one has any clue who they are because everyone has moved onto other creators who aren’t so incredibly restrictive.
I hate everyone involved in this.
How about this: if you don’t want your shit to be embedded, don’t publish your shit on a platform that is built upon embedding?
Or just configure your shit properly so that your web server doesn’t serve your content out if the request is from a different page. Don’t know how? Don’t have that much control over the configuration of your hosting servers? Whose fault is that?
Turning around and trying to sue away the technology that you thought would bring your prosperity because it didn’t give you what you wanted makes you a stupid fucking asshole.
Re:
Chill with the victim blaming and technocratic gatekeeping. I hope that you’re not the kind of person who thinks that a Facebook user is more at fault for using a privacy-violating app than Facebook is for violating privacy in the first place. Yeah, the victim is partially to blame. But don’t get distracted if the jerk deserves more blame.
Re: Re: "Victim" blaming, huh?
Where/Who is the “Victim”????
Using a medium where embedding is such a fundamental part of its nature and then complaining about someone embedding something is about the same as hanging your newly painted picture outside for all to see, and then trying to hold anyone else but yourself responsible when it gets rained on.
Trying to start lawsuits because some other site embedded a view of your picture is not too different that trying to sue the TV station because people were viewing your TV show on a Samsung TV, instead of a Sony TV.
Part of putting your content on the internet is the implicit acceptance that you loose some amount of control.
ACTUAL victim blaming is dreadful. If a five year old child is punched in the face by an adult, suggesting that this dreadful act is in any way the child’s fault is a horrible thing, and a very different set of moral absolutes.
If I lay out all of my money and valuables on the dashboard and front seat of my convertible and park it on a busy street with a crowded sidewalk, there’s a pretty good chance that stuff will be gone by the end of the day. In that case, I would be a “victim” of crime, and anyone who took anything from my car would indeed be a criminal. Most sensible people would look at me and gently suggest that perhaps this was not the best way to store my valuables. This would not be victim blaming, but rather a moment to point out that there are ways to prevent this from happening.
Stop trying to leverage the moral absolutism of one situation to prop up your assumptions of the the other.
I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean, but from your context, it seems as though you take issue with my notion that before you try to use a platform for your benefit, perhaps you should take a few steps to familiarize yourself with how it works, and whether or not it is compatible with whatever your trying to do. I do not in anyway support anybody “gatekeeping” anything, whatever that actually means. I do support people actually making an effort to understand how the internet actually works, before they fall victim to their ignorance of it.
I am torn on this one. I generally think that most large corporations will always put money ahead of ethics/morals/laws, etc… so it’s easy to say “Facebook is terrible for violating users’ privacy”, but it’s hard to jump in and agree that Facebook wronged its customers by selling out their privacy when anything more than a slightly hesitant glance at what Facebook actually is, and how it makes money, would be more than enough for a reasonable person to put two and two together and understand that nothing they post should be considered private.
You can’t possibly accuse anyone of stealing something from you while you are still giving it to them.
This goes back to the idea should you pay for linking to an article or a video,the open internet depends on the ability to show a link or link to a video on youtube or other websites.
news or tv, film websites can use robots.txt or paywalls to stop random users using their websites without paying or signing in as a member .
embedding encourages users to visit the linked website to see more content.
“They are saying that in addition to grabbing the “embed code”—a short snippet of web code that allows embedding content into another page—website designers and users should also have to negotiate a copyright license to display the embedded content.”
Da’faq did I just read?
You posted your content on a platform that you KNEW offers an embed code that would be used by others to spread the content and NOW you are demanding they shoudl have to negotiate a price to do so.
How about you build your own system for displaying works without the embed code available that clearly tells people they have to negotiate a price to give you more publicity.
Some cars are used to rob banks so I think all banks should be able to collect a fee from every car owner.
idiots
In context
The worst result here is less bells and whistles.
Embedding would be replaced with links. Just like the past before embedding was developed extensively.
That fact being “good” or “bad” depends on your taste for bells and whistles on the internet.
The absolute worst case scenario is replacing boxes with “previously embeddable content found here” links.
Not exactly a death blow to the internet.
It's a feature, not a bug
If you don’t want your “property” copied and displayed on screens all over the world, you’d better keep it off the internet. That’s like all it does.