Quadrille - 2:19 pm on Jun 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

There's a (very narrow) grey area for directories and search engines, when they show the linked pages with a small frame of their own at the top, eg. for rating purposes.

Google won a case about cached pages, on the grounds that it was a temporary use, as well as the clear indication that it was not Google's property. Others have used 'part pages' successfully under 'fair use' provisions of copyright law.

But as you say, these are gray areas - most copyright theft is pretty obvious stuff, and easily proven to SEs and hosts - but not worth the legal fees to chase the perps.