How To Broadcast Yourself On Youtube?

If a YouTube video includes intellectual property that has been recorded off broadcast television, and the YouTube video is then embedded into my blog or website, have I  broken any copyright laws? Am I liable to any prosecution because I have made this YouTube video available on my site?

• It is obvious to me that if I post a video I have recorded off TV that is owned by another, and do not have their permission, I have more than likely committed an offence. What is less clear to me in this age of huge numbers of short clips of TV in You Tube videos, if embedding someone else's YouTube could make me jointly liable if the IP owner chose to prosecute. Here's a specific example from the current Euro2012 football: on YouTube there is a great little clip of the penalty shootout in a quarter final. It's off a non-English tv station I do not recognise, and is not identified. I'd like to embed the YouTube video in a blog. Can I? Should I? I'd appreciate some wisdom, as I'd like to do the right things.

• Answer:

  The law in most countries is still undecided on whether sharing a link (including embedding a YouTube video in a a browser iframe) is a copyright violation. DMCA about this on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmca#Linking_to_infringing_content When you embed a video, you are not hosting it on your website and are not actually copying or distributing the content; YouTube is. The process that someone would have to go through in order to get a DMCA take-down acted on would be to go to YouTube, which would then also make the video unviewable on your blog's page. But even if you embedded a link to someone's self-posted (not using a content site, like YouTube or Flickr) copyright infringing material, you may be off the hook. Embedding is just an advanced form of link sharing in which the link is automatically loaded by the viewer's computer and displayed in a reserved window in their browser, as defined by your HTML and CSS code. You are not actually hosting or distributing the content, just sharing a link, essentially. But again, the law in this area is unsettled in the US and the UK.