How does "BASE HREF" alter a search engine's perception of a page?

I've got a page to provide for a client that is information provided
by one of their suppliers - the client wants to capitalize on the
content for their own use, so I grabbed the content using php and
getwebobject function I found in some php archives.

This means the page is now apparently resident on the client's site,
rather than the supplier's site - so in theory, the content appears to
be his.

There is a rub... to make the images work, we have to put in a:

<BASE HREF="http://www.suppliersite.com/">

This ensures that the images which use relative URLs don't appear as
broken images - but I'm curious as to how this will affect the way a
search engines determines the source site for the data - does it
totally negate the use of the page on the client site as far as search
engines are concerned?

I know that joe browser will not view this, and to them, the content
is now the client's, but a search engine might totally disregard it...
any ideas?

tia

Greg Hewitt-Long
http://www.webyourbusiness.com/