That's nice. I thought about using thumbnails to linked sites before, but I wonder about the legal dimension. What if someone puts something illegal, or copyri

That's nice. I thought about using thumbnails to linked sites before, but I wonder about the legal dimension. What if someone puts something illegal, or copyrighted on one of the linked pages? Does anybody have advice (internationally / US / Germany)? I'm based in Germany, and here there is strong legal protection for "quoting" excerpts. However, it is often debatable what counts as a quote. German news sites often take a photograph of a screen, instead of a screenshot. There seems to be protection for search engines (e.g. Google Photo Search), but the situation is not clear. There is also no "fair use" or safe harbor like in the US. I'm especially afraid of cease and desist letters (Abmahnungen) - there is an entire industry of people who crawl the web and find copyrighted images with image recognition. The mean thing is that they don't let you use their tool to check for compliance - I would gladly buy a license for images I accidentially use, or remove them - but it is more profitable for them to send you a letter. (Rant: I once had a case where someone accidentially printed a copyrighted image on a document and put a scaled down picture of that document on a domain managed by me. The copyrighted image was about 50x50 pixels, mirrored, and black and white, but they had me pay ~800 Euros for it. Funny thing is that they never ever contacted us via the contact email. They didn't care about their client's rights or about selling an image, they wanted to milk us. They sent physical letters to people they thought related to the site, until they grabbed me (the Admin-C of the domain). Now I heard they are going after people rewteeting or liking copyrighted images - IMHO that is ridiculous, there should be a difference between "including" and "linking to" an image.)