scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> So this seems to indicate that you can hyperlink to any freely available 
> content without any requirement to inform the user that what they see 
> next is not your content.

I think that the question that that court decision is dealing with is
about the practice that many websites (especially in the past) had that
prohibited linking to their pages without permission. (It was quite common
for websites to have a usage license where it was stated that it was
forbidden to have links to any page within the website except for the
main page.)

The court decision affirms the logically proper interpretation. In other
words, that trying to stop people from linking to your webpages is idiotic.

However, the question in this thread is about using images of other
people. Certainly the fact that linking to whatever is publicly available
on the internet is completely legal has the side-effect that deep-linking
to images (ie. putting <img src="..."> tags in your web page with an url
to a completely different website you don't own) is also legal.

What is *not* legal is for you to make a *copy* of that image and put it
in your own server and use it like that.

(Also, deep linking images is both being quite an a-hole, plus it's risky.
It's being an a-hole because you are basically abusing someone else's
bandwidth to increase the appeal of your own website. It's risky because
the image in question could disappear or change at any moment.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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