I have another objection to this technique, and it’s that by adding the copyright info as a “footer” to the image, it’s trivially easy to strip it out and use the image illegally. It also adds a not-insignificant amount of bytes to each and every file it’s applied to, which doesn’t sit well with me (even if it’s added dynamically, it’s still inflating the page-size for all users, most of whom probably wouldn’t steal the images).

I suppose having a big (and probably unexpected) copyright message appearing at the bottom of an image one had stolen would deter most casual copyright infringers, but not, I suspect, anyone with sufficient determination.

If an image is really important enough to the author/owner to protect it in such a way, then I am of the opinion that there are far more elegant and harder-to-circumvent solutions (subtle watermarking, steganographical storage of identifying information such as the user’s IP, etc. – combined with a clear deterrent-warning that images carry such protection).

In any case, hooray for de-crufting it! ;)

You’d need either a fixed height around the image with overflow: hidden; or set min-height on the img + * element.