In a recent brief news story about the resignation of Austin HS teacher Tamara Hoover I included a 200px wide thumbnail of Ms. Hoover taken and rescaled from her partner Celesta Danger’s flickr stream. Today, I’ve received the following emails from her:

[1] i take the unauthorized use of another’s intellectual property right very seriously. since, you did not ask permission nor recieve it to use my image, you need to remove it so that further action is not necessary.

[2] to all images of tamara hoover on your blog. thats infringement, since the intellectual property is mine and use of that property is unauthorized. please take them down so that further action is not necessary.

[3] you do not have authorization to swipe images of mine and re-post them where you see fit. my images do not fall into fair use guidelines b/c the public does not benefit from you posting my image next to you blog. if fairuse applied in this case, people like cnn.com would have used an image. take image down, do not use my images without permission again. if you want people to see them , then set up a link to my website.

Rather than continue this, I decided to point her to Chilling Effects’ FAQ on “fair use.” The section of interest begins, “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently held in Kelly v. Arriba Soft that displaying the copyrighed images of another as thumbnails on a search engine was a fair use because the thumbnails served a completely different purpose than the original images.” I also removed the image hosted on my server from the post, and simply hotlinked it to Flickr’s thumbnail, thus absolving me of responsibility.

My question to you–is the image as it appears in that post fair use or not? I derive no financial benefit from including that particular image, and I am not disrupting her business as a photographer and artist, because I simply use the post to direct readers to her Flickr stream and other external resources.

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