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.'"

Comments

Good, saves some people trouble.

[Apuleius]

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.

Re:Mixed Feelings

[dinotrac]

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!

Re:In other words

[drodver]

Two sites which are sustained by ads but are not porn:

ShackNews
Fuckedcompany

There are others.

Re:This is absurd.

[Bonker]

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.

Re:In other words

[Twylite]

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.