Thursday, January 22, 2009

Linking and Liability for Creators [Part VI]

We will now focus on derivative works. Consider a hypothetical site designed to present popular comic strips to the public. To incorporate the strips into the site, several IMG links are utilized. These links instruct visiting browsers to retrieve the images comprising the strips from the official comic sites, such as the Doonesbury web-site maintained by Garry Trudeau. The images retrieved in this manner are grouped together on the new hypothetical site, creating a "Sunday comics" page. Although none of the comic images are stored with the hypothetical page, the resulting page arguably creates a new derivative work that is based on those preexisting images. Although this argument is not clear-cut, the creation of any derivative work of another's image without permission is copyright infringement. (Brad Bolin of www.bitlaw.com)

[Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV] [Part V] [Part VI] [Part VII] [Part VIII] [Part IX] [Part X]

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