Am I allowed to copy images from other websites and place it on my site?

Hi, I am designing my first website and I wanted to know if I am allowed to just copy and paste images from other sites onto my own site? I have heard that you can only copy and paste images without copyright marks on them, or you just have to make an attribute. Could someone please explain this in details?

 

not allowed...

 

I will give you a little more info;

as far as I am aware, as soon as you publish something on the web, you own the copyright for that asset, therfor even if an image doesn't have a copyright watermark on it it is still in fact copyrighten to the creator and you should not use it without prior consent.

With saying that, in practise, if you are just using it for a personal website with no commercial value then go ahead noone will sue you but if it is for commercial use or in any way related to a business use do not use them, it's more trouble than it's worth!

 

How do you know?

First of all you need to find the information on-site. Some places allow you to copy images some others use public domain ones, browse the fine print, usually at the bottom of pages.

If you cannot find information on-site you can always contact them, but in this case it's more likely images are copyrighted in this case or if not respone comes up.

 

There are many sites where you can get 'royalty free photographs' (just type previous into google) but yeah, if its for a hobby site you should be fine (although still not legal) but if your profiting thats not a good idea

 

Some folks can get pretty mad and it's possible to be sued even if you're not making a profit. I once got into to trouble for doing an original graphic that just looked similar to someone else's work. Nothing happened to me, but my art was deleted off of DA. I am still not certain why because it wasn't actually copied but people can get really weird about this stuff.

 

And keep in mind that "royalty free" doesn't mean that you don't have to pay to have the license to use the image. It just means that you don't have to pay royalties - in other words you only pay once.

 

Where do you two get off telling people to do something totally illegal?
you can NOT just copy ANYTHING from ANY website without PRIOR permission from that site.

I does not matter if it is being used comercially or none commercially it IS copyright infringement and they can still be sued.

what stupid statements from you both

Yes they WILL

No they WONT

 

uh.. I dont care if its personal or commercial, i wouldnt want my photos used, especially without my permission.

 

So how come web.archive.org and similar services can do it (on mass scale)?

 

when I use some others images,I will leave a link back to the source and a courtesy message ..
never faced problem till now..

 

It is risky to use images from other website without their permission. If the image is a general purpose image then why not try something like bigstockphotos.com

 

No not without their permission.

 

In part because archive.org is a non-profit organization, so non-commercial. They also are not picking and choosing a handful of images to illustrate their own personal web site. Instead images are archived along with their original source. And you can opt out of having your web site archived.

 

Unless the copyright owner has given you permissions to use their images, such as a statement on their website stating so, you cannot use other peoples images on your sites.

 

Do a web search for "copyright faq" (without the quotes) and you'll find answers to such obvious questions.
* There is a copyright on images when they are created.
* Putting an image on the web does not change the copyright.
* Before you take an image for reuse you have to know if you can use it.

If a web site wants you to use an image they know that they should tell you, because they know that otherwise you'll assume that you can't use it. So simply look on the page with the image for permission to use the image, or look at the site's terms, conditions, and license pages. But beware of sites which accept contributions and which "believe" everything is PD.

Notice that there are many sites offering images with various restrictions. Some only allow use on a web site but not T-shirts (that can be a problem for your site logo). Some don't let you modify the image. Some require attribution in various ways (some only require a link, others require the name be visible). Some sell non-exclusive full rights to images (so you can do anything you want, but someone else can also buy the image). Some will sell you exclusivity and all the rights, so you actually own the only copy.

There is an exception for public domain images. If an image is truly in the public domain, you can do anything you want with it, but it really must be in the public domain. For example, Wikimedia (the Wikipedia image server) has a license notice but also has some images which are in the public domain (I know some are in the public domain because I created some of them) - for an image in the public domain you can ignore the licenses which are on that site. But it's always your responsibility to know what the correct status is. Some sites erroneously claim that images are in the public domain, and you have to deal with that.

 

Just making a note outside the already long comment to clarify. Because I uploaded a few images to the Wikimedia server which I know are in the public domain, I can definitely say that some of the images on those servers are in the public domain. I've uploaded photos which I took myself and declared them to be in the public domain (and used the CC-by-PD "license" to declare that), and I've scanned images from very old books and uploaded those (they were PD before I scanned them and I merely had to label them as PD so others knew they were PD).

I also will point out that public domain does not always mean that something is free. I have paid for images which I knew were in the public domain. I am sometimes willing to pay for a higher resolution image than I can otherwise get, and I have paid for several PD prints to hang on my wall. I know that I have the legal right to reuse them, although so far I have not needed to reuse them publicly.