ISFDB:Image linking permissions

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The ISFDB displays images of cover art for publications, and images of authors. In both cases, the ISFDB stores a URL of an image hosted on anther site, and displays that image (hot-linking) during page generation.

Contents

Local hosting

As of 15 May 2008, uploading of images via the ISFDB-wiki's upload file facility was enabled, and a number of cover and other images have been uploaded since that date.

The policy on how and when to store images on the ISFDB is still being debated. See Help:How to upload images to the ISFDB wiki for one guide. The tagging described in that page does not have full consensus support among ISFDB editors. The URLs of images hosted on the iSFDB wiki can be used in publication records just as any other image URLs.

The remainder of this page applies to images hosted elsewhere than on the ISFDB site.

The need for permission

Since such images are hosted by another site, that site will get a hit, and a request to serve the entire image each time that an ISFDB user views a page with an image URL being displayed. If the ISFDB uses many images from a given site, and those images are on relatively popular ISFDB pages, this might result in a significant amount of bandwidth for the host site. Since the images are displayed as part of an ISFDB page, no other content from the host site, and no advertisements it may include, are displayed. Some host sites are unwilling to permit this. In particular, Wikipedia, and other sites run by Wikipedia's parent, the WikiMedia Foundation, have a strong policy against such use of images hosted on their sites. They consider it "bandwidth theft" and will block all links from sites detected in such linking, according to their announced policies.

List of sites granting permission

  • The following sites have granted permission (explicitly, or implicitly by virtue of their own terms of use) to the ISFDB to link to images that they host.
    • Visco which covers only magazines and not books. The ISFDB has explicit permission to use Visco's images and has logic to add a credit to Visco.
    • Amazon - ISFDB has implicit permission to use Amazon's images as an Amazon associate. A good-quality medium-sized image available usually even for those books that generally only display a tiny thumbnail marred by "Search Inside!TM" is images.amazon.com/images/P/0123456789.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg : i.e. the 10-digit ISBN without dashes. Check that the image is actually the correct one for your edition though: and beware if it's a publication still in print, as it seems Amazon use this for the CURRENT edition and may change it without warning. A more stable alternative seems to be to search for the ISBN on another Amazon site and find one without the "Search Inside" problems: e.g. Amazon.UK may have "Search Inside" whereas Amazon.com do not, or vice versa. Use the "See Larger Image" before choosing the picture.
      • Sometimes you will see an Amazon image that's framed by a large white border such as ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51cXim2%2BwSL._AA240_.jpg. The "._AA240_" tells Amazon what size image (as a square) you want displayed. Amazon's logic seems to be that they will scale an image down to the size you want, but will not scale up. Instead it wraps the image in a white border. When you see a postage stamp size image on Amazon the best course seems to be to use the original (unscaled) image which you can get to by removing the "._SS500_" or "._AA240_" size indicator, for example, ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51cXim2%2BwSL.jpg , and let ISFDB scale it.
    • Fantastic Fiction - ISFDB has explicit permission to use Fantastic Fiction's images, but please first check to see if the image is available on Amazon and use that as Fantastic Fiction's bandwidth is limited.
    • Phil Stephensen-Payne's "Galactic Central" - ISFDB has explicit permission to use images hosted by "Galactic Central".
    • Fantascienza.com - ISFDB has explicit permission to use images hosted by Fantascienza.com. To find the URL of a publication, select 'titolo' (title) in the search box on the home page and type the title (in Italian or English), then follow the links. The format is: www.fantascienza.com/catalogo/cov/DD/DDddd.jpg, where "DD" are the first two characters of the five characters code DDddd in square bracket.
    • icshi We are now permitted to link directly to the covers: if you do so, please at least credit 'Icshi" in the notes, and an occasional hyperlink or two back to the site would be appreciated.
    • vanvogt Japanese site, but English text with lots of pretty covers and artist info. Yutaka, the sitemaster says "You may link my pictures to anywhere you like, but I'll be glad if you would let me know where you use them" - so drop him an email if you need to use one of them on the ISFDB.
    • Magnus' van Vogt site Icelandic site with good selection of covers Magnus is very generous too: "Hi. Feel free to link however you want, I have free bandwidth where I'm hosting the images."
    • Besides the sources listed above other image sources are Ace image library and Bookscans ("Graphically illustrating the evolution of vintage American paperbacks - 1939 through 1959"). Note that these sites have not given ISFDB explicit permission to use the images and so ideally you should ask on a case by case basis for permission.

Sites known to refuse permission

The following sites are known to have policies against the kind of image linking the ISFDB does. These sites should not be used in the image URL fields, although a URL that is not a link could be placed in a notes field.

  • Wikipedia "Check the licenses of the images to figure out how to use them. In no case attempt to serve them directly from our upload server: that's commonly called 'bandwidth theft', and your site will just be denied access to our upload server as a consequence" (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights/Archive_5)
  • Wikimedia Commons "Directly embedding files from Wikimedia Commons on the fly into an external site ('Deep linking') is considered bandwidth theft and external servers doing so will be permanently blocked after Wikimedia server admins recognize it.... You are always welcome to download files you are interested in for reuse as long as you follow the license conditions provided alongside the files." (from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:First_steps/Reuse)


Sample request for permission

This is designed to be sent by email or as a physical letter. It is merely a suggested letter, volunteers are free to modify it in particular cases, or to use a completely different letter. But any communication requesting this permission ought to be careful to explain clearly just what permission we are asking for.

I am a volunteer with the Internet Speculative Fiction Data Base (ISFDB) which is located at http://www.isfdb.org. The ISFDB is a bibliographic database of works of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and related works of speculative fiction -- that is, it displays information about the titles, authors, and publications of such works. When we display information about a particular publication (an edition or printing of a particular work) we prefer to display an image of the cover of the work, so that the public can see exactly which edition is being described. We do this by including a URL of a publicly posted image in the database. When the publication page is displayed, the page logic uses the image found at that URL as an image source for the page display, which results in a call to the host server. Also, the displayed image can be clicked to access the image on the original site directly. An example is http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?THLRDFTHRN1972 for an edition of The Lord of the Rings. We also link to images of authors in the same way. However, we only use URLs from sites that have agreed to permit us to do so.
Your site <name of site>, located at <base URL>, has images that would enhance the ISFDB. We would greatly appreciate it if you would permit us to link to those images. The ISFDB is a completely non-profit, volunteer-run organization. We think that it does provide a valuable public service, and does help promote speculative fiction in general. Please let us know if we may display images from your site on our pages by linking to your site. Please copy your response to <official email address> so that the ISFDB as an organization can preserve a record of it.
Thank you
<signature of volunteer>

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