The difference is that I'm ready to tell Free Republic to moderate the immages off of FR if I or they receive any copyright violation complaints. You don't seem to be ready to give up "free" linux do you. That is probably what the damages would ammount to in this case since they are not being used for a PROFIT like some people are attempting to use the linux kernel for. By the way I think that the other posters here who use graphics and immages probably use Google Images for the purpose. Also I think that NON PROFIT
use of such immages in a parody mannor as I use them constitutes legal fair use. All of the pictures of Dubya, Hillary, Arnold, Gray Davis and Cruz Bustemante I see here are modern and certainly would NOT fall in the public domain would they.
The difference is that I'm ready to tell Free Republic to moderate the immages off of FR if I or they receive any copyright violation complaints. You don't seem to be ready to give up "free" linux do you. You're willfully ignoring the possibility that the images you're stealing (because they were acquired apart from the content with which they were intended to be viewed) are copyrighted and their use restricted, so I imagine you should be ready and willing to withdraw them.
I, on the other hand, have licenses (GPL and others) that explicitly grant me restricted rights to use the code and to derive from it, and no evidence to cast doubt on the grantors' rights.
As for "giving up" Linux, you're right, I refuse to give it up on the basis of wild-assed, constantly changing claims from David Boies and his merry band of clueless, money-grubbing stuffed suits and their "pattern recognition experts" (a.k.a. "a couple of soon-to-be-unemployed-anyway entry level coders with a total of one year of experience between them, a shiny new copy of O'Reilly's Learning bash, and nothing better to do").