Suppose I want to put an image (a comic strip, say) on my webpage, but I don’t have it on my computer (or my ISP’s computer). But I find it somewhere else on the internet on a page that does have permission to show it. So I use the html <img> tag to reference that other location without getting permission.
Is this a copyright violation? I haven’t made a copy of the image, except perhaps as a temporary file that’s been deleted. Yet whenever someone accesses my webpage, they see this copyrighted image in the middle of my text or whatever. Has any court ruled on this?
It’s bandwidth stealing at best, and always a bad thing to do. Write for permission to use the the image on your sight, or don’t use it. Some people give permission to link to their sites without contacting them. I did not say embed their material in your web page. Rarely some give permission to use their picture on your site, without contacting them, this is always to be hosted on your sight, and not the image on their site. Bandwidth stealing can cost a lot of money for the site. I fully support people changing file names after a while and putting a substitute in it’s place that is offensive to people and says bandwidth thief.
The fact that some people just couldn’t figure out the difference between linking an image on their web page and linking on somebody else’s web page, is one of the reasons HTML was turned off on this board
I haven’t said I’ve done it. In fact, I have not, nor do I have plans to do so. Nor was the issue of bandwidth of interest. I just wanted to know if anyone had considered the copyright issue.
While i agree that bandwidth leeching, by embedding other people’s images etc. in your own html, is a Bad Thing, the fact is that it is very easy for website owners to prevent via the .htaccess file. Any person who has their own domain, and complains about hotlinking, really needs to learn how to use their site tools.
The copyright question is an interesting one. I’m really not sure what the answer would be. Presumably, as a purely practical matter, it would behoove the copyright holder to go after the person who is hosting the image. After all, if the image is removed from the host site, your (and other people’s) hotlinks will no longer display the image anyway.
There was a case in the late 1990s, where one company sued another for copyright infringement because the defendant’s website
So, by using a frame, the defendant effectively “hotlinked” a whole web page.
The defendant moved to dismiss the claim, arguing that
The court dismissed the defendant’s claim for immediate dismissal, but i don’t know how the case turned out in the end, or whether the two parties reached some sort of agreement before it was decided in court.
Google has so far been able to argue that their image searches, which reproduce small thumbnails of images from web sites, and their webpage framing, fall within fair use guidelines. See the Wiki summary of the Perfect 10 v. Google case. Note that Google lost the fair use argument in California District Court, but that the District Court decision was reversed by the 9th Circuit Appeals Court.
This article, from 2005, arrives at no firm conclusion about the copyright issues surrounding hotlinking. An interesting point that comes out of that piece, however, is that the bandwidth theft and copyright issues involved in hotlinking can effectively run in opposition to one another. One blogger
So, if you decide to leave copyright control in the hands of the owner, you end up stealing their bandwidth. If you don’t want to steal their bandwidth, and place the image on your server without permission instead, you commit a fairly clear case of copyright infringement. It’s a rather interesting dilemma. Of course, the easiest and probably most ethical thing to do is to use only images that are out of copyright, or that you have permission to use.
I could imagine a scenario where some cartoonists might want you to hotlink their strip - or rather, they might want you to embed it so that a click takes the viewer to their site - costs a bit of bandwidth, but gains a bit of traffic.
Not sure if there are any that do this, but it’s a very common operational model with other content types, especially video.
If you’re going to hotlink, email the host first or else you might end up with something very disgusting on your webpage after the host figures out what’s going on and moves a couple files around at his end. Hilariously disgusting story about that. (Largely SFW if you don’t click the link he warns you about. The disgusting stuff is certainly two clicks away from this page.)