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Linking and Embedding

Linking and Embedding

Jul 24, 2017

Linking

Linking is not a copyright activity under the Copyright Act. This is because you are not actually ‘copying’ any material, just providing a path to its location on another website. As a result, providing links to material on external websites is a good way of managing copyright in the delivery of education. Also as no copying has occurred, no attribution is required.

It is generally not necessary to seek the permission from the website owner when creating a link to their website. However, it is important to include an acknowledgement of the source website.

The most important thing to ensure is that you do not link to content that you suspect may be an unlawful copy (i.e. the content has not been communicated by the copyright owner.)

Deep linking (linking to a specific page in a website) is not considered to be any different from linking to a home page in terms of copyright and is therefore acceptable.

Broken Links

The fact that links break and require updating is considered a benefit as this constitutes an effective currency check of resources. If material has been copied and uploaded, you will not know of the original has changed. 

 

Important

The only exception to this is where the terms on the website in question explicitly state that linking or deep linking is not permitted.

Embedding

The Australian Copyright Council recommends that permission is sought before embedding or framing content unless the copyright owner has specifically indicated that they permit embedding or framing.

An indication that the copyright owner has granted permission might be if they have enabled an embedding function on their website. One site where you often see a clear permission to embed is YouTube, where users can include an embed button for the videos that they upload. Remember that this is a user provided permission – i.e. each user can decide whether they enable the embed function on their videos and if not enabled, then you do not have permission to embed.[1]


As with linking, the most important thing to ensure is that you do not embed to content that you suspect may be an unlawful copy (i.e. the content has not been communicated/uploaded by the copyright owner.)