I am really confused when it comes to this copyright issue. I am looking for an answer but have not found anything yet.
The situation:
I have a site with external links to youtube videos.
The problem is:
I am not always sure if the person that uploaded the video is the rightful owner.
If the disclaimer of the video states:
I do not own the rights to this song.
It is mainly for educational purposes.
(Is it still ok for me to link to these videos)
I am worried that if i link to these youtube videos that i might violate copyright.
I don’t want to break any copyright laws and i don’t want to go to prison.
If i added on my site a disclaimer that states that, i link to a song from youtube and that i am not responsible for whether the content is pirated or not.
Would this make it legal or not?
In the Netherlands there have been a couple of sentences lately where owners of sites that linked to illegal material (links in pages written by themselves, material posted and hosted by third parties) have been kept liable. As far as I understood, the judges ruled that by publishing those links, they were actively and knowingly increasing the exposure of illegal material and therefor the chance of it being downloaded and used by the visitors of their site.
If you have to demonstrate that you couldn’t know the material was illegal, then things are getting quite complicated.
I imagine that has a lot to do with what the “illegal” content is. In the case of Youtube, they wouldn’t waste time going after those that linked to the content, they would just send a DMCA to Youtube and have it removed.
That is not good. Does anyone else know of any similar situations.
The main reason, why i only wanted to link to youtube videos, is because i think there is more copyright control.
I don’t want to infringe on any copyright laws.
I know a couple of folks in Europe that have mentioned they stopped linking to Youtube because they received notices. I have never seen this and hope it never happens to me.
Embedding copyright infringing material is often argued to be ‘contributory copyright infringement’, and clearly goes hand in hand with the perceived business model of the site. For example, a site which is openly encouraging infringement to its visitors and linking to copyright infringing material may be seen as contributing to the act of infringement, even if they are not hosting directly.
Recently ICE and Homeland Security, arguably at the behest of the entertainment industry, has more recently tried to twist this into criminal copyright infringement, and even attempted to extradite a UK citizen who ran a linking site which in the UK has been deemed legal.
Every day you read some completely ludicrous copyright ruling in Europe regarding linking, where for example Google is currently getting hammered in German, France and Italy over linking or because of videos uploaded by their users.
So the sensible answer is that if you embed from the artists official youtube channel, you’d think you’d be okay, especially if your site is not actively encouraging infringement. But unfortunately there seems to be no sense in some of these rulings.