One of the strange legal questions that always followed around social media was the copyright status of an embed. An embed —an image or video which is displayed on a web page, but the content itself is  pulled from another web server.

Certainly, if you just copy a photographer's image and slap it on your brand's site, that's a violation of copyright. But what if you embed it instead, from a public platform like Instagram.

Well, a new ruling by an American court has found that embedding images on third-party sites does not necessarily constitute copyright infringement as they are not direct copies of the original content but rather HTML code that serves as a link to where the original photo is stored.

The case started as a class action lawsuit filed by two photographers in 2021 against Instagram, alleging that the platform violated their copyright by letting news outlets embed photos they posted on their accounts without proper licensing. Their lawyers argued that Instagram's practices misled third parties into thinking they had permission to use copyrighted material.

⚖️ Appeals Court Decision

Initially, a California judge dismissed the suit last year, saying that the news outlets were not displaying actual copies of the photos. However, the photographers appealed the decision, leading to this final finding. 

According to the filing:

The embedding website does not store a copy of the underlying image. Rather, embedding allows multiple websites to incorporate content stored on a single server simultaneously. 

… So long as the HTML instructions from the third-party site instruct the browser to retrieve the image located at a specific address, the browser will retrieve whatever the host server supplies at that location.

Image: Canva