[NonValueAdded]

According to the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use pages (dare I post a link? Yes, I do: here) we are "inlining" images which is ok for thumbnails according to the 9th circus but that full size image "inlining" is not settled. Shaky enough ground to avoid.

There was other discussion in this thread about watermarks present or not present. I don't know about that but isn't there copyright information contained within the jpeg specification itself? Isn't that how Corbis came up with those identification numbers? If so, it may be possible to automatically screen for Corbis' material. Anything sized larger than a thumbnail could be rejected and a click on a thumbnail would cause the new window, "now leaving FR" treatment. Just a thought.

[dennisw]

Also beware of inlining content. Inlining (sometimes referred to as "mirroring"), which is similar to framing, involves the process of incorporating a graphic file from one website onto another website. As with framing, the site whose graphic is being used is likely to object. For example, United Media, the copyright owner of the "Dilbert" comic strip, pressured a computer user into halting daily inlining of daily comic strips taken from the United Media website. In other case involving inlining of photographs, a search engine created small reproductions (“thumbnails”) of images and placed them on its own website. A court ruled that this practice was a fair use and not an infringement because the thumbnails were much smaller and of much poorer quality than the original photos and served to index the images and help the public access them. The court did not rule on whether the reproduction of the full sized image, not the thumbnail, was a fair use. (Kelly v. Arriba-Soft, 03 C.D.O.S. 5888 (9th Cir. 2003).)