Recently I found an interesting case study from one of my clients. His site was getting sued for copyright infringement for linking to content on another site. On the surface of it, the whole idea of suing someone, simply because someone links to some publicly available content on your site, appeared silly to me. After all, linking forms the heart and soul of the web. Without sites linking to one another, sending reference, (read visitors) the web would be dead in no time!

So out of curiosity I checked out his site.

This is what I found - he was linking to some copyrighted images on the other site using the img tag.

Consider a site A giving a reference to an image on site B using img link on its page. Now when someone opens site A's page, this img link will instruct the browser to retrieve the image from site B. Although site A is not storing any image from site B on its page, yet the resulting page creates a kind of derivative work which draws from a pre-existing image on site B. So it can be argued that site A's owner has infringed on the copyright of site B's owner.