Ditto was sued by Les Kelly a photographer after Kelly discovered that Ditto had indexed his own website and the images found there. Ditto.com prevailed before the trial court but suffered a defeat on appeal before the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Although the Ninth Circuit found that Ditto.com's use of thumbnail images was allowed under the copyright law doctrine of "fair use " it held Ditto.com liable for infringement of the public display right for opening a new window to display the image. This technique is known as "in-line linking" or "framing" and is commonly used by numerous other Web search engines including Lycos Google and Altavista. By concluding that these common linking techniques infringe copyright law the Ninth Circuit seriously threatened linking on the Web.