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

The hypocrites are posting....

[BlackStar]

First people, get the facts straight and don't shoot from the hip from the badly "framed" byline. You may still link to a site from yours. That's not an issue. But you may not extract or appear to be the origin of information from that site by inline embedding or framing of subsections of that site.

Why is that bad? Why is that "against a free and open Internet"? That protects copyright. That's ALL. A photograph is copyright by the original author. So is a written work. So is source code. In fact, copyright and license is all that's stopping a popular enemy of many of the readers of this site from running off with a lot of source code and using it in proprietary products. This law protects the originators of work. It gives the author the ability to control and decide how that work will be used.

Anyone can still create excerpts of works for research, indexing and review purposes such as short links to stories, quotes of larger works, and now, thumbnails. This law extends the long-respected and venerated copyright law into the realm of digital images, and in what I personally feel is a responsible and very fair way.

For once, the law appears to be creating and extending a statute by case law in a fair way, in line with the intention of the original law, and it's getting slagged by some of the people it protects. How disappointing.

Try to weigh the rights of an author to own their labour vs. a free for all. This law protects and extends the right of each of us to create something, and either give it away, or sell it, or distribute it in some other novel way. Without that, anyone can take anything any of us does and use it in any way they wish, without our permission, and without compensation, and most importantly, without any concerns as to the intent for the use of the work originally.

Thus endeth the rant. Just think.