Originally posted by: mugs
Originally posted by: spidey07
Originally posted by: Jzero
Originally posted by: spidey07
How can it not be?
That's what the copyright is for. See that first word? copy.
You are making a copy of something copyrighted.
But, by the very nature of the way web browsers work, a copy of the remote data is already stored locally on your machine. Is it also legal to go into your browser cache and copy the same item to another location on your computer?
good point. And why copyright laws in the digital age are sketchy.
Another sketchy issue is when you embed an image stored on another server directly into your webpage - you didn't copy it, the data is still coming from the owner's server, but it's obviously not the way the owner would like their copyrighted work to be used. Some copyright owners even have an issue with "deep-linking" - linking to a specific article on a news website for instance, allowing the user to bypasss the ads on the main page. Some newspapers prohibit it in their terms of service.
jntdesign, iirc you're the webmaster for a newspaper? I'd say you should tell the powers that be that using javascript to prevent people from right-clicking would only serve to alienate your readers. If they really WANT to steal the picture, there's no way to stop them. They could view the source of the website and type the URL of the picture in, heck they could even take a screenshot and crop out the text. Not to mention the image is only stored in the cache. It's not like other newspapers are going to steal your pictures, they know the law, it's just casual users they're trying to stop, and it doesn't benefit them at all to do so.