Using images from other sites

[Darran]

I am not sure if this is the right place to ask but I couldn't find a better fit.

Let's say we want to display the poster of this particular movie, could we simply save it and then upload it on our server? Is it considered violating intellectual property? I hope someone can give me some advice on this issue.

 

[Shadow]

It depends on the image. However, as a general guideline I'd say as long as its for non-commercial use you could claim it under fair use, and hence it would be fine. You may want to get some clarification on this though, I'm not an expert in this area and it's a bit of a legal gray area.

On a similar thread, if you do decide to use an image from another site, don't just link to that image. Thats called hot linking, and its the bane of a web master's life. It's annoying and it eats resources from the site it was originally posted on. It's not as bigger issue on the massive sites who have bandwidth coming out their shoes (like Yahoo!, AOL etc) but for the smaller ones it can have disastrous consequences. 🙂