Image Copyright on the Web

I am unashamedly addicted to Google Analytics. If I am not looking at the number of visitors, I am investigating where they are coming from, and for Webometric Thoughts, many of them are coming from Google Images. I have had visits from 53 different country-specific Google Image search engines, and a little probing finds it is probably driven (bizarrely) by photos of me in different t-shirts! Whilst I found I am the top result for both'blog t shirt' and 'qr t shirt' (as well as appearing in the results for similar queries), I was surprised to find that other people have used my image on their blogs!

Along with the rest of the blogosphere, my blog does occasionally use other people's images to illustrate a point. Personally I am never sure whether it is better to embed the image, thus using the other person's bandwidth, or to copy the photo to my server. Whilst embedding the photo is less likely to be a breach of copyright, copying the photo seems to be the politer option.

But really people, are photos of me really the best illustration you can find??