Thread

Linking to a website, in most cases, is always a good thing. Especially, via a trackback.

Lets say, a website has an interesting blog entry with an image on it. I decide to link to this website, commenting about his blog entry and quoting some of his work.

On my post, I have the h1 header as “Interesting blog entry about foobar”.
Below the h1 header, Im supposed to include an image that is relevant to my post. So what better to do, then grab his image and crop it for my post.

Generally speaking is this ok?

What Im really doing is just cropping the image (i.e. not displaying it in full). Afterall, the post I am posting, is about his entry. And if viewers from my website want to see the full image, they would have to go to the other website. Which is a good thing, because I am directing traffic towards them.

Hi Kriz,

Whilst I don’t know the exact law that governs this kind of thing because personally I think it is a very hard thing to implement due to different countries laws being different I think that the best thing to do in this sort of position is to ask the site owner first.

I do remember reading something years ago about legally being able to use something like 10% of an image without any problems but I do think that was aimed at a certain country and also may have changed nowadays anyway.

Best thing is always to ask the site owner first. If you providing them with a link anyway then most will be pretty open towards your offer.

Also the only other thing that it might depend upon is what the rest of your site is advertising. If for example you were advertising certain elements that go against the other persons beliefs or whatever then it may be that you would go against what they believe in and so they wouldn’t be happy with what you are doing.

I would ask first.

Don’t know if that helps at all though.

Best wishes,

Mark

I’d be careful with that. It’s definitely better to ask first. I saw a post on apartmenttherapy.com (i think) fairly recently, where someone did just what you are describing; they posted a cropped version of someone else’s photo with a link to their post about decorating their home office. The person whose photo and post were linked got mad because:

a) the photo was used without permission
b) the photo was used without attribution (even though the photo linked to the original post)
c) the photo was cropped
d) there are ads on apartmenttherapy.com, so in effect, they were making money off of the other person’s content

In the end the original author ended up taking down the original post and marking the related photos as private on flickr.

Obviously, this is just one person’s reaction, but it’s a good example of how many different ways you can get into trouble by doing something that you perceive as harmless. In my opinion, it’s ALWAYS better to ask first.