Image linking and copyright violation

Recently I found an interesting case study from one of my

clients. His site was getting sued for copyright infringement for

linking to content on another site. On the surface of it, the

whole idea of suing someone, simply because someone links to some

publicly available content on your site, appeared silly to me.

After all, linking forms the heart and soul of the web. Without

sites linking to one another, sending reference, (read visitors)

the web would be dead in no time!



So out of curiosity I checked out his site. This is what I found

- he was linking to some copyrighted images on the other site

using the img tag.



Consider a site A giving a reference to an image on site B using

img link on its page. Now when someone opens site A's page, this

img link will instruct the browser to retrieve the image from

site B. Although site A is not storing any image from site B on

its page, yet the resulting page creates a kind of derivative

work which draws from a pre-existing image on site B. So it can

be argued that site A's owner has infringed on the copyright of

site B's owner.





Author Bio:

Lakhya Phukan is the webmaster of Hedir Web Directory. Submit your site for free review and inclusion by experienced communities of Hedir.