ISFDB:Image linking permissions

The ISFDB displays images of cover art for publications, and images of authors. In both cases, the ISFDB stores a URL of an image hosted on anther site, and displays that image (hot-linking) during page generation.

Local hosting
As of 15 May 2008, uploading of images via the ISFDB-wiki's upload file facility was enabled, and a number of cover and other images have been uploaded since that date.

The policy on how and when to store images on the ISFDB is still being debated. See Help:How to upload images to the ISFDB wiki for one guide. The tagging described in that page does not have full consensus support among ISFDB editors. The URLs of images hosted on the iSFDB wiki can be used in publication records just as any other image URLs.

The remainder of this page applies to images hosted elsewhere than on the ISFDB site.

The need for permission
The ISFDB links to cover images only on sites that have given the ISFDB explicit permission to do so, or sites whose own stated policies or terms of use grant such permission. Since such images are hosted by another site, that site will get a hit, and a request to serve the entire image each time that an ISFDB user views a page with an image URL being displayed. If the ISFDB uses many images from a given site, and those images are on relatively popular ISFDB pages, this might result in a significant amount of bandwidth for the host site. Since the images are displayed as part of an ISFDB page, no other content from the host site, and no advertisements it may include, are displayed. Some host sites are unwilling to permit this. In particular, Wikipedia, and other sites run by Wikipedia's parent, the WikiMedia Foundation, have a strong policy against such use of images hosted on their sites. They consider it "bandwidth theft" and will block all links from sites detected in such linking, according to their announced policies.

List of sites granting permission

 * The following sites have granted permission (explicitly, or implicitly by virtue of their own terms of use) to the ISFDB to link to images that they host.

Sites known to refuse permission
The following sites are known to have policies against the kind of image linking the ISFDB does. These sites should not be used in the image URL fields, although a URL that is not a link could be placed in a notes field.


 * Wikipedia "Check the licenses of the images to figure out how to use them. In no case attempt to serve them directly from our upload server: that's commonly called 'bandwidth theft', and your site will just be denied access to our upload server as a consequence" (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights/Archive_5)
 * Wikimedia Commons "Directly embedding files from Wikimedia Commons on the fly into an external site ('Deep linking') is considered bandwidth theft and external servers doing so will be permanently blocked after Wikimedia server admins recognize it.... You are always welcome to download files you are interested in for reuse as long as you follow the license conditions provided alongside the files." (from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps/Reuse)

Sample request for permission
This is designed to be sent by email or as a physical letter. It is merely a suggested letter, volunteers are free to modify it in particular cases, or to use a completely different letter. But any communication requesting this permission ought to be careful to explain clearly just what permission we are asking for.

Sample request for permission - French
This is roughly the same letter as above but translated to French. Most of the work was via Bablefish and the result was tuned up to fix issues such as that "site" was 'fished into "place" rather than "site" as in web site.

If the person you are requesting permission from does not seem to be a computer techie you can remove the latter half of the first paragraph starting with "Nous faisons ceci en incluant..."