There is a case from the European Union that suggests
that court still generally don’t recognize a website that embeds content that
itself turns out to be infringing on copyright and gets removed, as guilty of
contributory copyright infringement.
In Policy Review on Nov. 26, 2014, Philippa Warr
writes about a case of BestWater mbh International v. Michael Mebes and Setfan
Posch, and the writer is somewhat critical of the opinion as potentially
encouraging more piracy, link here. Also videos are the most common embeds,
still images and PDF’s can also be included in “iframe”. There’s another, even more detailed story
Kluwer copyright blog here.
Generally, a blogger intending to embed just one video
to illustrate something (like scenes from a movie, for a review) has no sure
way of knowing that the original content does not infringe, although YouTube
does have some automation that does prevent some infringing material from being
uploaded. I think a problem could occur
if someone deliberately provided many embeds of the same source company with
the intention of making it look like the content was the “embedder’s” and
really wanted to encourage users to bypass paying for content as had been
intended.
The decision in Flava Works. v. Gunter (or myVidster)
by the Seventh Circuit in Aug. 2012 still seems to hold. The Wikipedia details are here and I haven’t heard of a SCOTUS appeal.
The logic of the EU court is encouraging for free speech here, even if it wasn't so much with it's "right to be forgotten" ruling recently.
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