vincevincevince - 5:59 am on Jun 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

larryhatch, please don't worry, I certainly do appreciate both sides of the argument, just only one side tends to get put here. I personally think that framing other people's sites or hotlinking their images without prior permission is both rude and wrong. Unfortunately (and I do mean unfortunately) the law is not judged upon what's right and wrong, moral or immoral, rude or polite.

I came to my viewpoint from a technical detached train of thought about what exactly is happening. The question is at what point the infringement is taking place, and, so far as I can see - the only action the framing site took was typing the URL of the site which is being framed. The action of infringement, if there is one, is carried out by the user's browser parsing the HTML of the page. If there was never a visitor to the page then there would never be infringement or the impression thereof, and so the infringment cannot have happened before that point.

I'm not a lawyer but from cases I have seen in the past a point of law seems to be argued upon the most technical and precise aspect of things, not the overall impression.

Sure, webmaster A has caused webmaster B's site to show within a frame deliberately. It could be argued that from the user/browser point of view, it isn't so much 'one site in another' as 'two sites sharing the screen'.

If webmaster A has framed the page with the intention or effect of misleading a visitor into believing that the content is owned by webmaster A and this is damaging to webmaster B then I am with you - it is entirely wrong and webmaster B would be quite justified in taking legal action against webmaster A. The thing I don't think is illegal is using frames on a third party site per se.

_{Thumbnailing has a clear case against it, I agree with that 100%.}