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9th Circuit: Thumbnails Are Big Enough For Fair Use

Posted by timothy on from the visual-impairment dept.

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.'"

3 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. In other words by Restil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have an image on my site, and someone does a direct link to it, to display it on their site...

    and therefore drains my bandwidth....

    and deprives me of any ad revenue or anything else as a result....

    I have to provide permission first.

    Hmmm... is there a problem here?

    Note, this doesnt' stop someone from creating a thumbnail and using it to link to my site... where someone can see the whole image.

    -Restil

    --
    Play with my webcams and lights here
    1. Re:In other words by the_2nd_coming · · Score: 5, Insightful

      a better analogy would be:

      you put a poster of a painting you did up to advertize your exibit at the musium.......some person comes along, whips out his industrial imaging copier to digitize the poster as good as possable, he puts the poster back, and a week later he is using it to promote his [enter project here]. by putting the poster up, you should have to deal with folks taking a picture of it with their cameras, but to take your poster, copy it then use the exact copy to promote whatever it is I am doing is Copyright violation. even though I put it out in full access of the general public.

      I however do think it would be nice if folks would just lighten up and only get pissy if they are not sighted as the creater of the work (when there is no wide spread distrobution with no compenation going on)

      --



      I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
    2. Re:In other words by thing12 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      No, the problem was that Ditto/Arriba used to link the full size image inline (they don't anymore). So other than the link below it you didn't have the original context. There's nothing wrong with the way google is doing things (framing the entire page with the image in context). The courts are simply saying that it's wrong to inline images from other servers without permission.

      Looking at it in a broader context - lets say that in a few years the whole web has moved to XML with Stylesheets to format it. And some popular news site, lets say CNN.com, has a /news.xml on its server which they would normally display to the end users with their /news.xsl stylesheet. So I decide that I like their news data, and I want to make a search engine to help people find news from all sorts of sites - theirs in particular. To help people find things easier (and of course to force them to stay on my site since eyeballs==$$$) I decide that while I'll give a link to the source, I'll at the same time take that XML content and use my own stylesheet to reformat it for display inline in my site. The browser is still retrieving the XML file from CNN.com's server, and all I'm doing is overriding the appearance of it for display in my site. Is that fair use?

      I can't imagine anyone who understands the issue thinking that it's fair use. Deep linking is not theft, but inlining other people's content is. Plain and simple.