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Okay disclaimer first: I'm not an intellectual property attorney, but my father is, so . . .
As I understand it certain use of other people's intellectual property is considered fair use. For example, if High Society did a write-up on Blue Blood, they could use a couple of full size photos from the magazine to illustrate the page in their magazine and that would be considered fair use. If some random AVS site scanned a few pix out of the magazine and resold them with no journalistic intent, then that is not considered fair use.
Thumbs are, as I understand it, considered fair use for linking to larger pictures/galleries/pages from another site when the site with the thumbs could perhaps not fall under fair use provisions in order to show the larger picture.
However, using a thumb of a photo belonging to someone else to link to something totally unrelated is not legally fair use. But I can't see anyone enforcing that, so it is more an issue of what the industry feels are appropriate standards for level of skim.
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