if someone wanted to insert a frame within their website containing another website, and you give credit to the website "courtesy of http://www.whateverwebsite.com", would that be okay?

[Edited on January 21, 2007 at 9:57 AM. Reason : engrish]

1/21/2007 9:56:15 AM

You don't have to ask at all unless you are specifically claiming it as your work. The technicalities come when your site is a cash generator. If it is ask permission from that website owner period.

You can provide links to any site you want but don't iframe it without permission.

1/21/2007 10:08:00 AM

host your shit in Russia and you won't have to worry about the technicalities of "freedom"

1/21/2007 3:11:52 PM

^

It's one things to link a site. Noone can stop you from doing that. It's quite another for making it seem like your creation, part of your site etc when it comes to making money.

1/21/2007 4:28:46 PM

yeah, what you're doing is not "linking". Even if you put a disclaimer or give credit, without explicit permission from the site owner, what you're doing is verging on stealing or copywrite violoation or something

1/21/2007 4:40:58 PM

or sealand

more sealand than russia though.

[Edited on January 22, 2007 at 4:12 AM. Reason : .]

1/22/2007 4:11:49 AM

I'm pretty sure it's legal, just don't make it appear as if it is your work. Hell search engines do it all the time for example google image search where it keeps a frame up top.

1/22/2007 8:32:25 AM

i guess it really depends on what you're planning on doing with it and what your intentions are. In the example of Google Images, google adds a small frame to the top of the page with information about your search, but it's quite clear that everything below the frame is another page. So i guess that kind of thing is fine. But if, for example, you style your webpage to look like another page, then use an iframe to insert content from another page in to your and only give a small disclaimer at the bottom.... i would say no

1/22/2007 9:06:15 AM

if you have to ask, it's probably not the right thing to do

1/22/2007 10:16:53 AM

^^^ google is a totally different ballgame. The person using the tool KNOWS everything that google shows is not their work. It's a search engine and one of the main reasons the copyright retards lose that battle. agentlion made a good point at how google blatently lets you know it's another webpage.

Generally follow these rules

1) Is it yours?
Yes - do whatever you want
No - continue to 2

2) Are you using it for informational purposes?
Yes - go for it
NO - continue to 3

3) Are you going to make money based on someone seeing this?
No - Go for it
Yes - Ask permission.

Some examples..

A distributor of Sony products needs to have a picture of the item they are selling as well as a description. They CAN link to Sony's main page and even iframe it because Sony allows dealers to do this. HOWEVER, if sony didn't have this information and a competitor did, you are NOT legally allowed to iframe their product description. In fact it would be stupid. IF I was the competitor of yours and found out you were doing that I'd replace those pages with

"This company uses poor business practices. They are so cheap they won't even create their own product listings. Is this the type of company you want to do business with? *my company URL*".

Since the statement is true and not libel... your company now looks like retards. Any solid company would notice a lot of direct traffic from another domain.

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Another good example would be encorporating another companies search engine as your own.

Company A sells items from a plehtora of distributors but generally part numbers can be the same. Since they didn't have a database of part number, company, products used in... they wanted to create an iframe that would allow them to use another companies search tool offered to the public.

Company B wants nothing to do with company A. In fact they were stark competitors.

Company A went ahead and did this. COmpany B, having good network administrators saw the traffic coming and found the tool on Company A's website. Company B sued the ever living shit out of A... A went bankrupt.

How could Company B do this? Company B does not own the information in the tool but they do own the tool itself. The only reason Company B won a monitory amount was because they estimated 1 in 10 people purchased the item through company A and since they had 16,000,000 hits over a period of 6 months with the average part costs $45... multiply that by 1,600,000. The judge agreed.

(I think this was an example from Business Ethics at ncsu. I forget where I heard this).

LAST EXAMPLE.

Lets say you are a speaker company. You make GREAT speakers. You find an incredible review about one of your products. You iframe that in. As long as it shows that website in the iframe and not just the text you are FINE! However if it looks seemless and part of your site with no relation to them... you can be sued. Though free to the public you are claming that work as your own in a sense.

So what's to be learned?
1) Don't use iframes. It's tacky, it's stupid and there's nothing good about them. Period.
2) If you absolutely have to use iframes, make sure what you iframe is something you have permission to put there or don't bother.

Like DonMega said... if you have to ask, it's probably not the right thing to do.

1/22/2007 11:56:58 AM

Raige, Attorney at Law

1/22/2007 11:16:51 PM