Can I use a thumbnail of a picture owned by another site when linking to them? I am asking since I would like to show a thumbnail of an image and tell the vistiors that this is resources available on other websites and to click the image to go to that webpage to view their resources on the topic. I would also link to the main page of that site below the thumbnail. The whole setup similar to google images but are afraid of the copyright implications of such a setup. What do you think?
ask them. I make requests like that frequently. They almost always say go ahead, and it builds goodwill. On the other hand if this is a form of automated scraping...
That would be a good idea if it wasn't for the fact that most webmasters in the area is question is terrible on answering mails.
Well of course nobody but them (assuming it's their image in the first place) can give you permission if that is what you want. Otherwise it's your risk to weigh. But actually yours is a better question than I thought at first. Considering Google certainly doesn't ask for permission, maybe it is ok. Or do they check for copyright info on each site? Not that big a task for google. I haven't been asked permission for their using thumbnails of my images. Where's my lawyer?
Thanks!! That ruling is very helpful and seems to indicate that I can do what I was considering doing. Especially as I have no intentions of being any where near as deceitful as Arriba soft and inline linke the fullsize images like that. I actually suprised that they thought the inline linking was ok.