Will i get in any legal trouble if i link videos from myspace such as simpsons (full episodes) and place them on my site? Also is it against adsense terms to have a message on my site like "click on the google ads to help support this site.. etc"?? Thanks
Yup its okay if you want to goto jail. I hope you were kidding. (No, both of those things will get you in trouble)
ok i can accpet second one getting you in trouble, are you sure about linking to myspace tho? because they allow you to place there videos on your myspace and blogs, sites etc.. so how am i in legal sense ment to know they are copyrighted? not trying to act like a prick of nethink jsut want to try and clear it up.
Linking to videos like the simpsons hosted on other websites is legal.. As long as you aren't the person who uploaded it.
The rule is that books, articles, movies, music etc are copyrighted at the time they are created. If they are in the public domain, there will be a notice that they are in the public domain. When people upload their own videos to YouTube or Myspace video, they give people the right to display the video on their own web site. However, you can be pretty certain that any commercial TV show or movie has not given their permission. Besides the legal aspects, there is the problem of the content of your site disappearing when the copyright holders contact Myspace/YouTube and get the material taken down (YouTube just removed 30,000 videos, for example).
Yes i understand that if youtube takes it down than i will loose the content, how ever if it is on youtube or similar site are they fully responsible for it? so if the content remains on my site and not taken down by youtube and i get contacted by say FOX will i legal be resposible or will youtube? I know that youtube dont really get blamed as their terms of service pass the blame down to the users who upload the videos.
You can't get in trouble for linking to a video on youtube.. Really.. It's no different from having a link to a search term on google which happens to have copyrighted material in one of the pages found.. You can't be held responsible..
"If they are in the public domain, there will be a notice that they are in the public domain. " This is not true. There is no requirement of notice on works in the public domain. Although you can be assured that all works created prior to 1923 are in the public domain under US law.
i dont know why people are so shunning of his question, like we dont all have a harddrive filled with copywrited material anyways... You never copied the content the person that recorded it to his pc them uploaded it to youtube did. I believe at worst your site could get shut down, but no legal action would be taken against you. I had a friend that owned a site exactly like that, and had no problems.. about the adsense, not illegal, but you will get banned (dont do it)
That's true, but I was trying to simplify it. The truth is that works may be in the public domain, but you don't know that unless there is a notice. You have to assume they are not. (And I didn't mention pre-1923 works, because there weren't a lot of moving pictures made before that date)
Also, one important thing most people are missing: Ignorance != immunity from the law. Just because you don't know something is copyrighted, doesn't mean it isn't. It's your responsibility to find out.
What I don't get is why would your site get into trouble for using the vides when they are hosted on the YouTube servers and it clearly gives you codes to embed the videos into your site. It looks as if they are just misleading their users to think that it is fine to use their videos on your site.
The problem is that the video contains copyrighted material. Linking to that material makes you responsible for the copyright infringement (take court cases vs Napster and other file sharing sites as example). So in this case all three parties could be held responsible. Just because Youtube makes it easy to link to a video doesn't mean that you should or that it's legal to do so (in cases with copyrighted material).