Responding to a recent copyright case making its way through the Seventh Circuit court, the MPAA has issued a brief supporting a judges ruling that merely embedding a video that infringes on copyright is as bad as hosting it, even if a person didn't upload the video. Huh?


Back in 2010, porn studio Flava Works filed an infringement complaint against video hosting site myVidster for harboring illegal videos that users had uploaded. Last summer, a judge ruled in favor of Flava Works and upheld an injunction against myVidster. Now the case is making its way through the appeals court.

Enter the MPAA.

The Hollywood consortium argues that those who embed can use embeds of illegally-uploaded videos to draw traffic to their sites and generate ad revenues with no repercussions. Here's their stance on the matter, which was posted by Ars Technica:

"Although there is nothing inherently insidious about embedded links, this technique is very commonly used to operate infringing internet video sites," the organization writes. "Pirate sites can offer extensive libraries of popular copyrighted content without any hosting costs to store content, bandwidth costs to deliver the content, and of course licensing costs to legitimately acquire the content."


And sure, while the fallout from this case would likely affect pirate enterprises more than the average internet user, how might this law affect us in 5, 10 or 15 years? Will we all be forbidden from embedding old music videos and awesome movie clips? [Torrent Freak via Ars Technica]