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9th Circuit: Thumbnails Are Big Enough For Fair Use
An anonymous reader submits: "According to an article from law.com, yesterday's decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (U.S.) will have far-reaching effects on web publishing. From the article: '... The court found that reproducing photographs to create thumbnail images is a fair use of the material, but displaying full-sized images violates the copyright owner's exclusive right to publicly display his works....But the court found that displaying the full-sized images through linking and framing was not transformative and harmed the market for the original photographs.' One lawyer is quoted as saying, 'It's basically going to do away with linking or framing without permission.'"
Unless I'm misreading, this means that
$WEB_MONKEY[0] at $SITE[0] can't put a
link like this: <img src="http://$SITE[1]/image.jpeg">
without being smacked down by
the admins at $SITE[1]. In the early
days of the Web people who resented such
linking would hack Apache to demand the
right referrer before serving an image.
It's still the better solution in my view,
but the courts are right to intervene.
The ruling was not against providing links.
The ruling was against linking directly to images. More specifically, it was for linking directly to and displaying images without any of their original context.
People could see Kelly's images without knowing they came from Kelly's site, or without any of the information he might wish to have associated with them.
To add insult to injury, they'd use his bandwidth to serve them up!
Two sites which are sustained by ads but are not porn:
ShackNews
Fuckedcompany
There are others.
If they don't want people to access the data anonymously, all they have to do in not give it away anonymously
Mod this guy up.
I worked for an artist one time on a website to sell nice framed prints of his artwork.
The trick was that the guy didn't want to put any pictures of his art on the website.
I told him very clearly and simply that he had two options. He could choose to give anyone who wanted it tiny versions of the art for free... a 1024x768 jpeg of any given piece of large framed art probably suffers about 90% resolution loss... and hope that the people who liked them would buy the full-sized wall-hangers, or he could not put them on his website and expect people to buy works of art they couldn't see.
I convinced him after a little while, and he made a few thousand dollars selling stuff. Then one of his relatives convinced him that people were stealing from him by downloading the images of the website, so he took most of them down. Now he doesn't make much money any more.
I just checked the site again, and a few of the pictures are back up... at a greatly reduced filesize. I bet he starts making money again.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
It would seem that the terminology being used is somewhat confusing. "Linking" appears to indicate a direct URL reference in (say) an IMG tag, rather than a "link to a page" (A tag).
Essentially there is no problem with providing a link to the original page, where the image will be displayed in context, but pulling the full image out of context is an issue.
From previous legal challanges and discussions, it would seem that "framing" is much less clearly defined. Providing a banner which indicates that you are supplying content as a proxy (or similar circumstance) appears to be okay, but having a site embed content from another site (say in another frame) where there is no indication that the content is not yours, would be considered framing.
This tends to happen most often when the site with the content has frames, and you have frames (in both cases, HTML frames), and you can link directly to one of their frames without the rest being displayed.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
I've been working at the company in question, ditto.com (formerly known as Arriba Soft) for several years, designing and building the technology that lead to this. The judge ruled against Ditto on one point, that being the display of the full-sized image. I'd like to clarify what exactly that means, though.
All thumbnails displayed are served from our own servers, not using the bandwidth of the sites being displayed in our search results. The issue that came into play was what happened when a user clicked on a thumbnail. When that happened, we would pop up two windows (as ugly as that is). One would contain just the full-sized image hosted on that site's server. The second window would be the actual page that the image was found on. Because of the judge's ruling, we no longer pop up the full-sized image, just the page that the image was found on.
I don't think this ruling will have much impact on us and others like Google who are providing the same type of service. The judge ruled upheld the previous ruling about fair use of thumbnails, which is the primary concern of this business.
If you create an image and you don't want other people linking to it without context, then you need to learn about HTTP. If you are too stupid, then you should pay someone to do it for you. The simple solution is a script or web server hack that checks the HTTP headers for a referrer and denies all requests for images without a referrer pointing somewhere on your site.
h tml
Here, from the HTTP 1.1 RFC, the section on referrers. Any browser worth it's spit should provide the correct Referrer header.
14.36 Referer
The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify,
for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from
which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the
header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows a
server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest,
logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped
links to be traced for maintenance. The Referer field MUST NOT be
sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have
its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.
Referer = "Referer" ":" ( absoluteURI | relativeURI )
Example:
Referer: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/Overview.
If the field value is a relative URI, it SHOULD be interpreted
relative to the Request-URI. The URI MUST NOT include a fragment. See
section 15.1.3 for security considerations.