Social Media and Copyright Issues

If you Tweet a quote from an Associated Press story, are you in copyright violation? If you use press releases to fill a Website with content, are you violating some code of ethics? In this article, Linda offers information about various copyright issues and what you can do to walk inside the line of legality in global venues like social media.

Is There Such a Thing as International Copyright?

Americans usually look to copyright laws developed for Americans, and European Union users stand by their laws regarding copyright. But, did you realize that India has copyright laws? Japan has copyright laws, too. So, if you're writing a blog that has an international reach, how can you possibly make sure that you're covered from a lawsuit regarding copyright issues from any given country?

In many cases, the country of origin is the one that you need to be concerned with when developing a blog, when twittering online or when publishing something to a social media platform. And, in most cases, you may discover that the very people who are concerned about you – or anyone else – stealing their works are the very ones who police the Internet for violations of use of their works. The cases I hear about usually result in the author asking the user to take the work down first before applying lawyers to the situation.

But, some companies have many attorneys and a lot of money, and the individual blogger is subject to their requests because of that money (or lack of it to fight the case). Is there an overall international law that applies to copyright? No. Is there an international law that applies to digital rights? No.

Yes, this is a sorry state of affairs. Here are some examples of what can happen to you...

Some "Copyright violations" Incidents...

• The Case of Using another Business Product for Comparison: In one case, a small business owner in the U.S. used a European company's products to compare his wares. He read over the copyright rules for this company, but he did not stay on top of the changes in that company's copyright rules. In response, the company tried to force this small American business owner to use their name as an image without 'alt' tags when he referred to them.

This company has scores of attorneys, and the American businessman was frantic – the court case was being held overseas and he had no money to travel, let alone to fight the case. But he turned to a non-profit U.S. organization that helped him learn that that foreign company had violated his civil rights with their demands. Additionally, they were asking him to violate usability and accessibility in digital rights that might land him in trouble in the future (based upon Great Britain's  PAS 78).

This case still is pending, and it belongs to a personal friend, so I do not have a link to any rulings or examples. He is not alone in this case, as many business owners who are in his business have practised the same over the years – and we've learned they also have been contacted by this European company.

• An Early Case of Feed Violation: Back in 1997, Sean Peck a former software engineer for Lycos, developed a news site online that produced headlines and portions of stories from newspapers across the world (much like Huffington Post does today). However, The Times of London discovered Peck's efforts and was miffed that he would try to 'steal' their stories for his Web site.

This was a difficult case at the time, as Peck had researched copyright law and he felt that his work was in line with other various search engines. But, the newspaper stated that by even adding a sentence or two of their material meant that some readers may avoid going to The Times site to register to read the news.

I could not find an outcome for this lawsuit, and I hope they avoided one for Peck's sake. On the outside of this case, on 27 March 2000, federal Judge Harry L. Hupp for the Central District of California issued a first ruling in favour of Tickets.com in the case of Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com (99-7654) involving alleged copyright infringement for hypertext linking. In his ruling, Hupp concluded "hypertext linking does not itself involve a violation of the Copyright Act since no copying is involved."

But, this ruling does not take into account writing summaries of a news article before linking. It appears that it is ok to do so if you follow the links that Huffington Post uses in their news summaries. Note, too, that Huffington Post does not summarize stories in some cases – their headlines lead straight to the article in other online venues. One other point – rulings often have been overturned. Be aware that one case in 2000 may not apply to your case in the future. For instance...

• The Case of the Link that Was Refused after 2000: Robert Davis managed to create a deep link to a Web audio broadcast produced by SFX Motor Sports, a Texas company that is one of the largest producers of "Supercross" motorcycle racing events. There was no direct evidence that SFX tried to block that link so others could not use it, but that did not stop the judge from stopping Davis.

The reason? It appeared that when Davis ran the link to his site, it avoided the appearance of any advertising sponsors. These sponsors were the heart and mind of the SFX event, so Davis was diluting the value of the event to the advertisers and "such loss will cause irreparable harm." This ruling was passed down in 2006.

Other stories exist, and you can find many of them on the Web. In most cases, the accused copyright violator was going beyond the idea of sense and sensibility, violating ethics as well as copyright. For instance, most Web developers know that it's a "crime" (as in a crime to steal another person's bandwidth) to link to an image on another person's Web site rather than putting the image on one's own servers and linking to it there. Yet, some social media sites allow users to link to images from other sites, basically stealing that site's bandwidth today.