what are you pointing to in the fair use overview? quote under Artwork and and Audiovisual Cases "Fair Use. A search engines practice of creating small reproductions (thumbnails) of images and placing them on its own website (known as inlining) did not undermine the potential market for the sale or licensing of those images. Important Factors. The thumbnails were much smaller and of much poorer quality than the original photos and served to index the images and help the public access them. (Kelly v. Arriba-Soft, 03 C.D.O.S. 5888 (9th Cir. 2003).)" the images are not thumbnails, they have been cropped and are in some of the cases in this thread not 'inlined' I'm not sure what your referencing. in the case of the buffy figurine picture used from the slideshow.com promotional image the image here is cropped with only half of the text showing, as well as being copied from their site and distributed here for all to see, a clear and blatent violation of the legal use as per the Slideshow.com web site for the use of their images. section 3 of the fair use from the web site you posted" "3. The Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Taken The less you take, the more likely that your copying will be excused as a fair use. However, even if you take a small portion of a work, your copying will not be a fair use if the portion taken is the "heart" of the work. In other words, you are more likely to run into problems if you take the most memorable aspect of a work. For example, it would not probably not be a fair use to copy the opening guitar riff and the words "I can't get no satisfaction" from the song, "Satisfaction."...." In cases of digital cloning you are taking well, their face, as the tools have become more and more easly accessible like Poser 5 with the face room and computer DVD players with still capture capabilities. it has become easyer to to digital cloning. as the quality is increasing rapidly it will soon be easy to reproduce a known character, model, actor etc and become harder and harder to distinguish from the original. There is a lightwave artist here at rend in the galleries that does 3d charactuers of famious people. they are not clones they are characteurs. if you use photos of a star even if it's free it's a violation of the original photographers copyright without getting permission 1st. if you use morphs, magnets and create an original texture for a likeness of a star or character i think it would then be under charactuer laws and parody, have no clue where the line would be, I don't think there is any case law on it so who really knows. but using images from the web from sites that say don't use this image is not fair use, it's a violation pure and simple, unless you get permission and state that you have gotten permission.