Copyright and Wrongs — avoid costly mistakes

‘Everything is free online’ attitude

Image lib­rar­ies now use recog­ni­tion soft­ware — focus­ing on infringe­ments has become one of their biggest rev­enue streams

Every­one wants everything for free these days. We’ve become accus­tomed to expect so much being offered to us online for free that we feel ripped off if we are actu­ally asked to pay for something.

With so much free advice com­ing from free for­ums, free soft­ware to com­mu­nic­ate with friends around the world for free, with free tools and free online ser­vices, we’ve even­tu­ally come to a point where we think the value of any­thing found online must be ‘gratis’. The Inter­net is a magic sweet-shop world where everything is free for us to take and use how­ever we would like — right?

Wrong! Espe­cially when it comes to images, the atti­tude of pre­sum­ing it’s OK to take and reuse, and an assump­tion that some­thing must be free, can land you in ser­i­ous hot water and can be very costly.

Here’s some things to bear in mind if you are look­ing for images for your own website:

• Don’t do a Google image search and then reuse images you find for your own web­site — you have no idea whether an image found on the Inter­net has any copy­right terms applied to it or not. How do you know the image doesn’t belong to Getty or some other expens­ive image lib­rary? You’ll prob­ably only know when they come after you want­ing a few thou­sand pounds in compensation.

• Read terms and con­di­tions — Many free image lib­rar­ies, claim to be ‘free’ but if you read the small print you’ll see that they are avail­able to use for non-commercial means, and they are not to be used to advert­ise ser­vices or products.
• Using your own images is a great idea, but make sure any­one fea­tured in your pho­to­graphs knows how you plan to use them and is okay what that, if you can, get their per­mis­sion in writing.

Small price for peace of mind

We prefer to use Stock Pho­to­graphy from com­mer­cial image lib­rar­ies such as Shut­ter­stock for own web­site and our cli­ents pro­jects. Though not massively expens­ive to pur­chase, the time spent sourcing appro­pri­ate images should not be underestimated.

When you do pur­chase Stock Pho­to­graphy, try and get the largest res­ol­u­tion format or image dimen­sions that you can. Using an image exclus­ively on your web­site is one thing, but if later on you can reuse that image for print or else­where within your mar­ket­ing, you’ll be really pleased you got a good size ver­sion which was suit­able for print too.