We Don't Know the 2nd Circuit's Position on Embedding and Copyright Infringement
The case revolves around copyright infringement related to the embedding of videos by Townsquare's XXL publication. Delray Richardson, the videographer, challenged the use of both the Michael Jordan and Melle Mel videos. The court did not resolve the central question of whether embedding constitutes infringement, as the case was defended on other grounds.
- ▪Delray Richardson owns the copyrights to the videos in question.
- ▪XXL embedded the Jordan video and the Melle Mel video in their articles.
- ▪The court questioned the transformativeness of XXL's embedding but did not provide a definitive ruling.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Technology & Marketing Law Blog |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2026/04/we-still-dont-know-the-second-circuits-position-on-embedding-and-copyright-infringement-richardson-v-townsquare.htm |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:21:58 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T18:31:49.574Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T18:31:49.574Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | mLFcJHlkqByN |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This case involves two videos: a video of basketball legend Michael Jordan breaking up a fight, and a video interview with rapper Melle Mel. Videographer Delray Richardson owned the copyrights to both videos. Townsquare operates XXL, an online hip-hop news publication. A Twitter account, DailyLoud, posted the Jordan video to X. XXL embedded it in a story about the video. The Art of Dialogue posted the Melle Mel video to YouTube, and XXL embedded that in a story about the interview. XXL also used screengrabs from the videos in its news coverage of the associated stories. Richardson challenged both the embedding and the screengrabs. My prior blog post on this case. Embed/in bed The central question in the case is whether embedding is infringing. We don’t get an answer to that question.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Technology & Marketing Law Blog.
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