Its not a hack unless he bypass some sort of physical security such as password. Assuming the password isn't publicly available of course. Plase provide any single precedent world wide (from an industrialize country) that state otherwise.
I don't have the time right now to search for a reference for you, so I guess you can feel free to scour servers to your heart's content.
Remember several years ago the case of Google v. some artist dude who said they infringed his works by reproducing it on their wee little thumbnail search service thing. In that case Google was a for-profit entity using his images as a way to gain profits, and he still lost. In this case the OP isn't using the images for any profit gaining purpose, he isn't claiming the pictures are his own creation, nor is he publicly proliferating them in mass media.
Not Google. Kelly v. Arriba Soft. And, although Arriba Soft won at the trial court, they were overturned by the 9th Circuit. The 9th Circuit did address the issue of "fair use" and said that it was "fair use" to copy the
thumbnails for a
limited time, but it was NOT a fair use to cache, even for a limited time, the full pictures.
And, in that case, the thumbnails did have a link to the full-size photos. The photos were not unlinked, as in this case.
I think a copyright statement and TOU statement specifying restrictions on use is very important in such case as this. The statement also have to apply to both place1.com and place2.com as the OP stated something about place2.com. If the copyright statement doesn't extent to a different Level1 domain if that's where the pictures were store then its also useless.
Why? Pictures are covered by copyright whether or not there is a TOU, copyright symbol, whatever. The copyright owner does NOT lose his rights simply by putting his work up on a website -- it makes it harder to control, but if he were willing to expend the time and effort to do so, he could still enforce his rights under copyright law.
And here, even though the works were on a server without a lot of security, there were no links to the pictures, which further suggests that the owner did NOT intend for public display of the larger photos.
Although there are no cases exactly on point, other cases dealing with "implied" licenses for copyrighted works have found implied licenses exist only in a very narrow set of circumstances. Merely putting a picture on a website does NOT give you an implied license to reproduce, display, or otherwise do anything with that picture in violation of copyright WITHOUT permission from the copyright owner.
I also think there are other certain fuzzy and foggy states concerning the issue even with a copyright statement. I refer to the Court continuous upholding of the Fair Use right to use a VCR and tape anything off from broadcasting available to the public at large.
Maybe you should read the cases here, starting with Universal Pictures v. Sony, because they do not say what I think you think they say. The cases do not suggest a broadening of "fair use" -- what these cases stand for is that you can't stop someone from making and selling a device that can infringe a copyright, as long as the device has a "substantial noninfringing use." In the Sony case, that "substantial noninfringing use" was the time-shifting of broadcast media that the VCR owners were
already entitled to have. See Universal v. Sony and RIAA v. Diamond for starters.
This is completely different from the current case, where we are talking about pictures that the user is NOT entitled to have.
In this case, the OP is getting images of himself off from a publicly available and accessible picture for his own personal use without regards to commercialization. That can very much fall under Fair Use by the court.
The fact that it is a picture of him is irrelevant. Fair use is a balancing of 4 factors, only one of which (and not the most important one) is whether the use is private or commercial. The most important factor by far is the fourth factor, "the effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." See Cambell v. Acuff-Rose Music. Because the market for "his" picture is small, and because his taking of the picture essentially "decimates" the market for that particular picture, it is probably VERY unlikely that he would have a "fair use" defense for the taking of this picture.
Similar type of Fair Use rights have been ruled in favor of celebs in certain case of picture use. Now don't remember exactly, but I think like 5 or 6 years ago some photagrapher sued a celeb because that person had used his pictures on an ads or something like that.
That has nothing to do with "fair use" rights, or even copyright at all. A famous person might have protections under the Lanham Act (trademark law) for misappropriation, and there are also tort causes of action for misappropriation of likness and false light publicity that cover the area of unauthorized use of a person's likeness in advertising -- it's illegal no matter whose likeness you are using, as long as it is without permission.
Look, the overall point is this -- the OP asked if what he was doing violated ANY laws. It does. Is he going to go to jail? No, of course not. Nothing is going to happen to him, unless he starts printing the pictures out and giving them to his friends so THEY don't have to buy them either. The fact is is that the OP is violating the photographer's rights to control his works, and is depriving the photographer of at least one part of the market, albeit a small one, for his work.