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I love this GIF, but can I post it?

22:49 / 27.06.03

If see a GIF on another site, grab it and use it on here, does it incur copyright problems? And it's late, and my HTML skills aren't up to much...so if anyone cares to sort it out for me, or wants to delete this post, go ahead!

12:00 / 28.06.03

This isn't a particularly obvious question. Let's put it this way - it's probably best to use images that you have on your own personal web-space and that you own, but often organisations don't really mind because you're basically promoting something they're trying to sell for them. That's not a recommendation to do it, but you know... Certainly if anyone complained, I'd take down the image immediately...

Less searchable M0rd4nt

14:55 / 28.06.03

Not sure about the legal angle, but here goes:

If you post the image from someone else's server you pinch their bandwidth, never mind the whole copyright deal. The best thing to do is hunt down sites which specifically tell you it's okay to ponce artwork. There are a couple of sites I know of that let you use their pics and so forth and don't mind too much if you remote link, but the images on offer are mostly just smileys.

I think it's generally okay to use images that others have created provided you include a credit and perhaps link back to the original site. If someone really doesn't want others using their images, they'll usually say so on their page.

16:41 / 28.06.03

I think the important thing to remember about the leeching bandwidth thing is that if this site was metafilter or slashdot, then that bandwidth could be grotesquely large. It is not going to be so large here, so it's not quite such a bit deal in practice, although many would say it was still in principle...