Hi friends, I am creating an ecommerce website. In this site, I will place some text link to other sites' picture. For example: http://www.google.com.vn/images/hp0.gif so whenever a net visitor clicks on this link in my website (for free), the browser will open "http://www.google.com.vn/images/hp0.gif" Is this action legal? Do I have to request for permission to place those kind of links in my website? I have tried to search on internet, most of websites state that I do not to request for permission. But I'm not sure if all of them do allow. I am going to place around thousands of text link like that on my site. If I have to ask for permission to all --> Anyone has experienced or known something about it, please help me! Thank you very much for your kind supports! Hai
I don't think you can get a straight answer to this. Here's what I found on the BitLaw website: Consequently, one should not include links to images found on another party's web site without first getting permission. And I think I agree as images are something that many website owners don't intend to be searched or directly accessed, unless the purpose of the site itself is to showcase images. On another note, Google Images has been blatantly doing it and nobody seem to object!
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Linking to images on other websites will consume bandwidth and many people do not like it. It is better avoided.
Hmmm. I am not so sure what you'd like to do with the images. The text links are mainly to link to other sites' images? Or will you use the images and then you want people to click on them? If you will display images on your site, you should be careful in choosing them. There are free stock photos and I actually search them using yotophoto. The terms of usage and licensing issues are there. In any case arunkumarsuri has a point. Some people are annoyed because of bandwitdh leeching and others simply don't like other people using the images they made (either through some software or photos they actually took).
There is an option to prevent using ur images bandwidth by somebody on their sites, if your hosting platform is Unix/Linux and in the Hosting Control Panel there is a facility Hotlink Protection, just add your website URLs on it and activate it, then ur images are prevented using by others on their sites directly linking to your site, I just tested it and works very much fine, I did'nt tried in Windows platform, but you should check it on ur Hosting Control Panel... Still u have problems, try a google search "free image hosting" and you can find lots of free Image Hosters that can be used on your site...
