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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