Won't link in my profile

For whatever reason, I can't get my photo to link on my profile page. Therefore, this blog is administered by a photo of me that I filtered in photocopy to look like an extra pretentious version of my friendster self-portrait. The William Li contributor, however, is the splendid William, Duke of Zell as portrayed by George Perfect Harding

Handsome, isn't he?

Well, at least it was until I read the copyright notice from the University Of Leicester. It says very clearly that I can't post their material on my site. So you can follow the link and see it yourself.

If I were a legal person interested in the internet I would wonder why putting a img src tag was substantively different than just putting a href tag pointing to the page where the image could be found. But as of now, I am still basically an I.T. person who is studying law, so I still understand just how stupidly insincere that argument actually is. Just so that I don't forget in the future, when my head is full of law, here it is again:

People understand that a hypertext link that identifies itself as a link to someplace else is something you click on in order to look at another site's content.

People don't know or care, however, where the image on the page that you build came from, they assume its yours. If it's not yours you are misrepresenting yourself.

William, are you working on your JD or your MONO (master of the nearly obvious, thanks Nicky Culpepper)?

I am bringing this up because lots of people post pictures on their web site, and explicitly disclaim their rights over redistribution only to then take down their web site because people img src the heck out of it. As their site slowly chokes to death they post stuff like "Don't steal my bandwidth" and they take desperate steps like blocking specific IPs but its ultimately like unstoppable dry rot.

Okay, okay. I know you people are smart and understood that this is what I was making fun of in my earlier post. But it's very tempting and easy to do. I did it here until I fixed it. I also think that Google has somewhat confused this issue by making it easy to search images without having explanatory text about "fair use" and whatnot