Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
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As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Thursday, February 21, 2002
14:34 - Oooo, legal precedent... http://www.law.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=law/View&c=Artic	(top)
This was posted on February 7, but I've been meaning to link to it with a few thoughts. The gist of the article is that a court has ruled that it's legal for one site to post thumbnails of pictures hosted on another, unaffiliated site... but it's not legal to post the full-size pictures that are identical to what's hosted on the source site. This is quite separate from questions of "deep linking" and bandwith leeching, which is an issue in itself. This case deals with presentation-- whether a site (like, say, a blog!) can link to copyrighted artwork on another site by presenting the full-blown content, or whether it has to be made into a thumbnail. I've been feeling vaguely uneasy about my inline image uploader for just this reason. I have it so I can embed any picture from any site into an entry in my blog simply by putting <picture> into the body where I want it to go; it then prompts me for a file to upload or a URL of a picture on another site to download, and then it scales it if I say it should and applies the appropriate <IMG> parameters. The upshot is that the image is stored locally on my server, rather than relying on a remote URL, so it will always work no matter how the other site might reorganize. But what if it turns out that this isn't legal? Whether or not I'm keeping a local copy, I have to make sure I scale down any pictures and make them links to the original site, instead of posting them inline at their full size. Comic strips are the best example of this that I can think of right off the bat. Most of the time, when I link to a comic that I think is funny or noteworthy, I make it a thumbnail and a link to its home server. But on occasion I've simply linked in the full-size comic, with a link to the home server and appropriate credits-- but it's still presented full-size on this page. That's now been made explicitly illegal, and I'll have to be careful of that. Where does the line get drawn? How much smaller does a picture have to be before it becomes considered a "thumbnail"? Does HTML scaling count, or does it have to be a genuinely resampled image? I'm not complaining here-- far from it. If anything, I'm pleased to see that some legal bodies have enough understanding of how the Web works to be able to prosecute this case in accordance with the spirit of the Web-- that people want to be able to post their original content without fear that someone else will be able to redisplay the full-size images without going through the original content provider's site navigation and authentication checks and so on. But they do want others to be able to link through thumbnails-- they're visual and direct, and most importantly the reinforce through a layer of indirection that the original content is kept somewhere else, that the person with the thumbnail is not the originator of the content. Now if only these same lawyers can tackle the issue of bandwidth poaching (sourcing images inline that are hosted on other sites, thereby causing the other sites' bandwidth to be siphoned off by users who aren't even viewing the other sites themselves). Forum avatar users, take heed...