In-Line Linking May Be Copyright Infringement–Goldman v. Breitbart News

Ugh, this decision is bad. How bad is it? It makes me sympathetic to Breitbart, and I didn’t even know that was possible. You may want a box of tissues nearby before reading this. The TL;DR: for over a decade, in-line linking has been treated as categorically non-infringing. This opinion flips that presumption and may eliminate all unlicensed in-line linking. Goldman (no relation) posted a photo of quarterback Tom Brady to Snapchat. It went “viral,” and third parties reposted the photo to Twitter. The defendants then “embedded” those tweets, including Goldman’s photo. Functionally, embedding is the same as in-line linking. The photo remains hosted on Twitter’s servers, and embedding automatically instructs web browsers how to obtain the photo from Twitter’s servers and incorporate it into the page’s HTML. The parties agreed to put a threshold question to the judge first:…

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