At 5:36 AM -0800 3/30/06, Roy Tennant wrote:
>On Mar 30, 2006, at 5:12 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
>
>>I see that a lot of the hits to my site come from MySpace.com where
>>teenaged and college aged girls have incorporated some of my pictures
>>into their pages. [...]
>
>[...]I draw a line between "personal use" for which I expect no
>payment for use
>of the photos (even the largest version I have which they can get by
>request), and "commercial use" for which the photo must be used a) to
>make money or b) in a product or to promote a product that is sold.

There's kind of two issues; the intellectual property issue that Roy
talks about, but also the use of computing resources issue. I'd be
worried more about the latter myself. Those hypothetical teenage
girls could have copied the image files and put them on their own web
server. Instead, they are linking directly to the image files on
Eric's server. Either way it would be a use of Eric's intellectual
property (if it is his!); either way it would be allowed 'personal
use' under Roy's policy for use of his IP. But if so many people are
linking to your files on your server (for their own purposes that
have nothing to do with yours), that it causes bandwidth or CPU
problems for you, that's what I'd be concerned about. They're kind of
using your hardware as their own personal web server.

Many websites will refuse to serve images to a request with an
external referrer for just this reason.

--Jonathan