Unauthorized Image Linking/Embedding - Beyond Tiki

H hanford_lemoore Tiki Socialite Tiki Central Joined: Mar 23, 2002 Posts: 1899	H hanford_lemoore Posted posted on Sat, Jul 30, 2005 2:42 AM It is often considered bad form to use someone else's images in an eBay auction and TCers here have voiced their opinions about it; I frown on people using my original backdrops and patterns from Tikiroom.com on their sites without asking me first (and frankly I don't give them permission when they do ask); and recently Captain Scully's work was lifted and used on a website without his permission, which he then asked the user to change. While most of the images posted on Tiki Central are posted by the photographers themselves, there is also quite a bit of unauthorized image linking that goes on here. It leaves the burden of image delivery and bandwidth on the servers of the original image, and Tiki Central doesn't have to store the image or even serve it to users. This is often called "bandwidth stealing". Tiki Central is not a top-tier website as far as traffic goes, but we're not small potatoes either, so the bandwidth that we're stealing is not entirely insignificant. In fact TC has often temporarily killed geocities and tripod websites due to unauthorized image linking. I wanted to post about this and get people's thoughts because TC as a community have been on both sides of it. We've expressed our annoyance at people lifting our images for eBay auctions and other uses without permission, but we've also turned around and lifted other people's images in order to make informative Tiki posts, as well as quite a bit of unrelated humor and commentary posts. What's the right balance? Is this something we should be worried about? Why is it frowned upon for eBay auctions but not in TC posts? Should we worry about impacting other people's servers with extra traffic? If we don't want our images lifted without our permission, should we be doing it here? Should we try to minimize it to when it is tiki-related or considered necessary? I am interested in your thoughts. PS, I'm not talking about actual copyright issues of the images themselves. I'm just talking about the issue of linking (using the [img] tag) to images on other websites without asking for permission. yet

It is often considered bad form to use someone else's images in an eBay auction and TCers here have voiced their opinions about it; I frown on people using my original backdrops and patterns from Tikiroom.com on their sites without asking me first (and frankly I don't give them permission when they do ask); and recently Captain Scully's work was lifted and used on a website without his permission, which he then asked the user to change.

While most of the images posted on Tiki Central are posted by the photographers themselves, there is also quite a bit of unauthorized image linking that goes on here. It leaves the burden of image delivery and bandwidth on the servers of the original image, and Tiki Central doesn't have to store the image or even serve it to users. This is often called "bandwidth stealing". Tiki Central is not a top-tier website as far as traffic goes, but we're not small potatoes either, so the bandwidth that we're stealing is not entirely insignificant. In fact TC has often temporarily killed geocities and tripod websites due to unauthorized image linking.

I wanted to post about this and get people's thoughts because TC as a community have been on both sides of it. We've expressed our annoyance at people lifting our images for eBay auctions and other uses without permission, but we've also turned around and lifted other people's images in order to make informative Tiki posts, as well as quite a bit of unrelated humor and commentary posts.

What's the right balance? Is this something we should be worried about? Why is it frowned upon for eBay auctions but not in TC posts? Should we worry about impacting other people's servers with extra traffic? If we don't want our images lifted without our permission, should we be doing it here? Should we try to minimize it to when it is tiki-related or considered necessary?

I am interested in your thoughts.

PS, I'm not talking about actual copyright issues of the images themselves*. I'm just talking about the issue of linking (using the [img] tag) to images on other websites without asking for permission.

*yet

Post #175765 by hanford_lemoore on Sat, Jul 30, 2005 2:42 AM