Hello all,

Linking to a website, in most cases, is always a good thing. Especially, via a trackback.

Lets say, a website has an interesting blog entry with an image on it. I decide to link to this website, commenting about his blog entry and quoting some of his work.

On my post, I have the h1 header as “Interesting blog entry about foobar”.
Below the h1 header, Im supposed to include an image that is relevant to my post. So what better to do, then grab his image and crop it for my post.

Generally speaking is this ok?

What Im really doing is just cropping the image (i.e. not displaying it in full). Afterall, the post I am posting, is about his entry. And if viewers from my website want to see the full image, they would have to go to the other website. Which is a good thing, because I am directing traffic towards them.

Generally speaking is this ok?

Generally...

No!

Generally, if you see a car and somebody left the keys in it, you can take the car as long as you leave $0.25 behind for the owner. Or link to his blog. You don't need permission to take anything somebody else owns. Especially if you leave a trivial payment that you decided on, in return for the goods you take.

</sarcasm>

It really depends. If you can't tell where the image came from, no, leave it alone. If it's a Creative Commons image and the info is on the page, then you just need to get the image from the original source and give proper credit. But it's better to find your own.

Problem is you don't know if his or her images are copyrighted or not

You could always write to the blog owner and ask his permission to use his image

It all depends on the image. Is the image related to something that every site features, or is it unique? If it's like say a baseball teams logo, just upload it to your own site. It is not cool to just copy the path to that image and display it on your site, because it will eat the other guys bandwidth, and not yours. So it's better to check and see what the origin of the image is. And upload it on your server, or a free image host.