A Manhattan judge has ruled against The Washington Post and the AFP for republishing a Twitter user's photos. But if the image had been inside an embedded Tweet, it may have been fine. A strange loophole.
A US District Judge has ruled that the AFP and Washington Post infringed on copyright by posting photographer Daniel Morel's photos of earthquake damage in Haiti.
The photos were posted to Twitter, from which the AFP submitted them to Getty. The WaPo found the images on Getty, and posted them on its website. The ruling explains, over the course of about 60 pages, that just because the images were posted to Twitter doesn't mean they were fair game for reposting elsewhere. The AFP argued that Twitter's terms of service, which allows the site to "reproduce" users' images, gave it the right to do the same. The judge said no.
Here's the thing: If this same situation occurred today, there would be a legal way to repost Morel's photos without his direct permission. All the Washington Post would have to do is use Twitter's embed function.
Twitter tells BuzzFeed that embedded tweets — that is, tweets that are embedded into the site using Twitter's official embed tool — are fall under Twitter's reposting rights, as outlined in its terms of service. So posting an image like this, which I tweeted earlier, is fine:
But posting the same image like this, without permission, wouldn't be:
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