Legal Question

[steinjr]

Indeed. No legal hassles whatsoever. When you put stuff up on the web, you implicitly give permission for others to create a link to your web page, where they will be seeing your images in the context you wanted them seen.

Is that really the case though?

Yes. In principle, a web page (not a picture, a web page) is a presentation unit. If you provide a link to a web page, you are seeing images and text in the context the creator of the page intended to publish it in. Providing a link to a web page is like providing a cite for a book chapter - giving the author, book name and page number. You are not displaying someone else's picture inside your own web page/post. Totally unproblematic in a copyright context.

In practice, a little common sense and common courtesy goes a long way. If you post a IMG tag showing a picture off another page, and also post a URL to the page where you found it, in a non-commercial context, you are extremely unlikely to be keelhauled or sued. There is also a little wiggle room in the fair use doctrine.

This really is not very hard, unless one wants to take things to the extremes. If you are uncertain about copyright, just post a link to the web page where you found whatever.

Smile,
Stein