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. |
