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Originally Posted by Candy
First question: Can I take an image (copyrighted or not) from someone’s website, copy it to my web space, and use [IMG] tags? For all practical purposes, let’s say a whole image or part of an image?
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Almost any image is copyrighted. What matters is if you have permission to copy it. If you copy something without permission, it can be criminal to provide links to it. If you do have permission, do whatever you like
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Second question: Does CNN, ABCNews, MSNBC, etc, basically all the big News companies, fall into the same league as NASA or an universities realm of big bandwidth (when using [IMG] tags)?
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IMO, hot-linking is mostly a matter of courtesy. There are two aspects:
1) Bandwidth: You can always provide a link, and then the host will loose the bandwidth either way, although the ratio of those who follow it and people looking at the thread is usually less than 1. If the ratio is expected to be low, it might be wise not to hot-link. Then consider how many views it will have relative to what it has in its original context. At BAUT, maybe it will be shown 1000 times in one day, while maybe a million will see it from CNN. In that case I see no problem. On the other hand, a poor geocities site with limited bandwidth, might suffer badly from hot-linking.
2) Copyright: The owner might not want the image to be shown in other contexts than the original...
In the end of the day, I think it comes down to common sense. Personally I would prefer more hot-linking, since I hate have to follow links everywhere, but that's just me