lucy24 - 8:50 pm on Mar 29, 2012 (gmt 0)

One of the most hysterical anti-theft devices I saw was a site that put images in the background of table cells and then put a 1x1 transparent gif in the actual cell and stretched it to fit the size of the image.

You mean, the way Google Books started out doing? I think they've now moved on to something fancier. In the beginning you had to jump through serious hoops to get at their page scans. (I'm talking about material that's public domain everywhere in the world, but they made it harder to access than most modern books.)

Wait, you mean a lawyer just hit the panic button because she learned the actual law about copyrighted material usage and attribution that has existed for quite some time?

I think the reference was to P's TOS, not to the actual law. The theory was that it would allow the provider to say "None of our business, nothing to do with us, it's all down to the individual member. Sue their shallow pockets, not our deep ones."