Sojourner
May 25th 2009, 10:58 AM
As in avatar's and signature pictures there is a field in which to paste a url of images. My question am I still liable for copyright infractions do that?
bdh
May 25th 2009, 04:02 PM
As far as I know (but remember, I'm not a lawyer), the law makes a distinction between linking to an image and copying an image.
For example, if you copy an image (as an attachment for example), there are copyright ramifications. On the other hand, if you use the image tag (it will still show on this [or any other] site), but it is not physically stored on this [or whatever] server and therefor there is no violation in that regard ...
BUT ...
... using an image tag is what is known as hotlinking and some webmasters take exception to that because it costs them money:
When you hotlink, the "seen" site only contains the embedded link and not the actual data. The remote site has to "serve" the data and on multiple hits on large images this can add up quickly to gigabytes or more. This has a $$ implication for the serving site because bandwidth costs money. (Also called bandwidth theft by some).
[Hotlinking can easily be blocked on the serving site though with a simple .htaccess directive so the assumption most make is that if the remote site allows it, the website owner the far side is OK with that, but that is not necesscarily a given].
