Embedding Content From Other Sites - Legal?

[seacod]

Hi Fellas,

Was just wondering if anyone is familure with the legalities (and not ethicalities as I'm sure it's not ethical) of embedding images/content from other websites without permission?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

seacod

[suffocator]

It really depends on the license of the content you intend to use. Some sites have licenses that cover the whole site including images/text. They can range from "You cannot use any of the content without written permission" through to "You can do whatever you want with it".

I would have to say you would be best off emailing the owner of the content (if you dont know this information then try the owner of the site you found the content, whois can help with this).

You should probably put a thank you note on anything that you take from another site as well, unless you have made significant changes to the text/images/functions.

Thanks,
-Suff

[bs_ink]

at the end of the day if they are that worried they would disable hotlinking and be done with it.

consider google or yahoo image search, do you think a site owner would take them to court cos their robot lifted the images from the site? not going to happen. and it cant happen if the server has hotlinking disabled

if the server hasnt got hotlinking disabled, they dont care that much about people using the images obviously.

not ethical, but the internet is indiscriminate there.

[suffocator]

at the end of the day if they are that worried they would disable hotlinking and be done with it.

consider google or yahoo image search, do you think a site owner would take them to court cos their robot lifted the images from the site? not going to happen. and it cant happen if the server has hotlinking disabled

if the server hasnt got hotlinking disabled, they dont care that much about people using the images obviously.

not ethical, but the internet is indiscriminate there.

Don't really agree with you there mate, Google/Yahoo is a search engine that index's pages to make it easier to find. They also offer a service to remove any indexed content.
Taking another sites images (regardless if you are hotlinking or just stealing) without providing a link back or asking the owner.
The OP also mentioned using content without permission, is there a magic "dont steal my content" button?
I do agree that the internet is a very free place, and the chance of a webmaster ever taking you to court is pretty much 1 in a million.
But as a web developer I know how much work goes into building sites and creating unique content, if I ever found anyone using my content without my permission I would be pretty pissed off.

Just my 0.02...

[daewoo]

if someone did that to any of my sites i would be sueing for bandwidth theft
in the past where i have come across people hotlinking my images i have contemplated redirecting the image to goatse , but instead i redirected it to my sites banner , free advertising

google/yahoo , a webmaster did take them to court for copyright infringement , it was a us based webmaster , the courts ruled in googles favour , the images were of porn nature which was costing the webmaster money from lost revenue