Posts Tagged: "Free Speech v. Menzel"

Rules on Copyright Infringement for Inline Linking Developing in the United States and Abroad

As the relationship between copyright and the internet continues to develop and technical distinctions are increasingly cast aside for more practical perspectives, new licensing opportunities are becoming available for content owners and creators. Two recent developments concerning online service providers’ use of so-called “inline linking” and those providers’ potential liability for publicly displaying unlicensed content from third-party websites open the way for this new vein of potential income.Inline linking occurs when a service provider “embeds” on the provider’s website content that is hosted at another location or “destination URL” on the internet. This is achieved using HTML coding, which retrieves content from the destination URL and shows that content to visitors on the service provider’s site. The inline link in the code of the service provider’s website thus constitutes a sort of window or “frame” to content maintained at another location on the internet. This is in contrast to the use of a standard text hyperlink, which, after a click, simply directs users to a destination without showing the content hosted there. A new European Union copyright law and recent decisions from the Southern District of New York and the Northern District of California suggest that what was once thought to be non-infringing inline linking may now require service providers to obtain licenses or face claims of infringement.