fair use of images on web

With the end of the year I've been examining the web logs from my site
and have discovered a fair number of hits which appear to come from a
program called webcollage. This seems to make a random picture by
fetching images from the web. If you click on one of the images in
the collage it takes you to the underlying page, but there is no
indication in the collage of the source of the images.

So the question is, is this a fair use of copyrighted web material?
The creator of this program is enabling users to "borrow" images and
make some sort of constructive use of them. Fair use usually means
a person can make a copy for their own personal use, but inserting
an image into another page without the context is generally frowned
upon.

One could argue that it potentially drives viewers to the site, but
an examination of the logs seems to indicate that visitors don't
make any further navigation of the site, not surprising since they
have no context in which to judge the image. On the other side,
for site owners that have to pay for traffic this could be seen as
an unwanted expense.

What do you think?

--
Robert D Feinman
Landscapes, Cityscapes and Panoramic Photographs
http://robertdfeinman.com
mail: robertdfeinman.DeleteThis@netscape.net

"Robert D Feinman" wrote...
 > [...]
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 > What do you think?

I think that it more relates to laws and copyrights than
to medium-format photographic _equipment_. Have you tried
law.school.copyright? How about comp.infosystems.www.misc?