JC, I would encourage you to get more familiar with the HTTP 1.1 spec with regard to your claim of copyright infringement. I will summarize my interpretation of a part of it here. When someone provides HTTP content, they are agreeing to the protocols governing the transmission of that content, which includes caching and transformation of that content by proxy systems. Fortunately, the spec provides for netizens to send Cache-Control headers that can exclude their content from storage on and transformation by proxies. These headers are outlined in the spec, so I'm not going to detail them here. But as far as I have been able to tell, AOL is in compliance with the Cache-Control specs. I see it like this: Not including Cache-Control headers and claiming copyright infringement is like publishing a novel in English and distributing it in the U.S., but printing the copyright notice in Chinese. Clients accessing your content must be able to understand that you do not wish for it to be transformed; and since proxies speak HTTP, content providers need to include the appropriate HTTP headers so the proxies understand their wishes. Conversely, when a content provider excludes Cache-Control headers, ISPs have free reign to handle the content and deliver to the end user in whatever way they wish, as long as that way falls within the HTTP 1.1 spec. As an aside, I have a special folder on my Apache server for Jessica Stover's website where I keep images that I don't want to be compressed by all of these web accelerators (Earthlink and NetZero have them too, not just AOL). In that folder's .htacccess file, I have included instructions to send the "Cache-Control: No-Transform" header on all files requested via HTTP within that folder; those images are not modified in any way by the various web caching systems out there -- the end user gets the identical image to what is stored on my server. ~ The Gunn webmaster@jessicastover.com
AOL is copying and redistributing the image in a new format *without the permission of the copyright holder* in a way that A) makes AOL money and B) removes protections that the copyright holder had placed on the image to help keep third parties from reproducing the image without permission.
and in doing so:
IMHO they are infringing on the copyright of those who have placed the digital watermark in the image.
jc