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Recent Court Rulings on 'Embedding' Foreshadow Split In Circuits
When and how can someone else's visual content be displayed on a website without the website operator running afoul of copyright law? When and how can someone else display the website operator's visual content? A recent ruling out of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York — on a popular practice at the center of these issues for entertainment and media companies — may upend the current paradigm. Nicklen v. Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., No. 1:20-cv-10300 (S.D.N.Y. 2021).
In Nicklen, a wildlife photographer/videographer posted original footage of a starving polar bear to his Instagram and Facebook accounts, highlighting the impact of global warming. The video went viral. The defendants, a news outlet and publishing group, posted the video in full on their websites. In posting the video, they did not copy the video and stream it from their servers. Instead, the defendants posted Hyper Test Markup Language (HTML) that directed web browsers to retrieve the video from the social media servers for viewing on the defendants' websites. This is known as "embedding." It links to the original post without storing the work on a server or creating a copy of it. The video of the polar bear appeared within the body of the defendants' article even when a reader took no action to retrieve the video or navigate to Nicklen's social media accounts, and even when a reader did not have a Facebook or Instagram account. Nicklen brought suit claiming that this violated his exclusive reproduction, distribution and display rights under the Copyright Act.
The Server Test
First, let's look at the world before Nicklen. Way back in 2007 — iPhones had just hit the market and YouTube was only two years old — the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit established what is known as the "server test" for determining whether embedding violated the Copyright Act's exclusive "display" right.
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