>Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foo

>Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context. I suspect the author of the article (and a lot of other people) would still be squicked out by the foot-fetishist link-aggregator site Yep, what furyg3 said. I always think about cases like that from a creator perspective. If I'm a painter, I probably sell my work, so it's in my interest that every usage lead back to a canonical place where I expect to make sales/build following/communicate with fans. So reposting a picture and posting a link to a said place I chose are absolutely different things. There's always fair use, which should cover things like education, citation, etc. That's a different topic. And don't get me wrong, copyright system is broken and rotten to the core, but some of the concerns on which it builds are perfectly reasonable.