Breaking: Copyright Win for Instagram

Landmark Ruling This Week

A sigh of relief was heard from marketers everywhere as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals delivered its ruling allowing free use of embedded links on the internet.

Commonly used to seamlessly share photos and content from one website to another, embedded links have been the target of ongoing copyright infringement allegations. The outcome of this ruling could have dramatically impacted marketing departments by limiting how images were shared digitally and increasing liability for infringement.

The court's latest decision, outlined clearly that such linking does not constitute copyright infringement and upheld a crucial test to determine the liability of entities displaying copyrighted content online.

The case in question, Hunley v. Instagram, involved two photographers who brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against Instagram. They claimed that Instagram was at fault for allowing media outlets like BuzzFeed News and Time magazine to embed their Instagram posts in news stories. Nevertheless, the 9th Circuit Court, drawing on its precedent from the 2007 Perfect 10 v. Google case, ruled that Instagram could not be held liable for secondary infringement. The court clarified that when embedding a photo, no "display of a copy" of the original image occurs, absolving Instagram from direct infringement liability.

Embedded photos are not copied in the traditional sense; instead, the process involves sending a request to a server, which then responds with an HTML text file containing links to the desired content, including images and videos. As a result, the original image does not reside within the website's own hosting server.

The legitimate nature of this widely-used practice being affirmed enables marketers to continue to share content seamlessly without the looming threat of copyright infringement claims. If the decision had gone the other way, marketers would have been required to secure express consent from the original copyright holder to share or relink any image. It would have also set a precedent for other potential lawsuits. For now, Instagram and the internet at large remain a free-for-all!