I will either porovide links to it (which is of course fine) but what if I show the image itself on my site. What do I need to ensure to keep everything nice and legal.
No, You are using other people's bandwith which costs money. Use Flickr or ImageShack to host images.
Its quite bad, to hotlink straight from another site, simply because as infonote said, you are using up other people's bandwidth, which isn't really the nicest thing to do. If the image is copyrighted, then simmilarly moving it to an image-host and then linking it to your site, is still bad, because in that circumstance you are violating copyright laws... Diarmuid
So providing a link to another peerson's website is bad? I thought thats what the internet was all about. Also, I see tons of sites with images that does not belong to them; An example, they have a product review, they will paste the image from the manufacterer's site. Look at all those tech blogs for example.
But you arent showing a link in the form of Google Instead in the scenario infonote was suggesting, you are using an image hotlinked from someone else's host, thus every time someone uses your page, their bandwidth has to load the image, which generally speaking is just not nice and hopefully not what the internet is about. Having an image which does not originally belong to you, is ok so long as: You are permitted under someone else's copyright to show that image on your website. The image you are showing is hosted on your account, unless you get specific permission from the owner of the image and the hosting account, to hotlink it direct from their site Diarmuid
Technically speaking, you aren't allowed to display their pictures on your website without their permission (even if you give them a link back). You could get away with it because of the internet being vast, but I'd advise against that
Hotlinking is illegal. Also if they have took the image themselves they own the copyright to it which means they can ask you to remove it and in some cases even take you to court over it. So either take the photo's yourself, purchase them off istockphoto etc or use royalty free ones
You're right. It's something "everyone" does, up to and including major corporations. Technically, its a copyright violation. Realistically, unless you're selling the images or putting the product in a bad light, nobody cares. If someone sends you a take down notice, just take it down and thats the end of it. So the answer to your question is that realistically, you can't post images from other sites and still keep it legal. But everyone else on the Internet does it too so its probably okay. What I will add though, is as other people pointed out, don't hotlink. Thats a different story altogether. If you want to COPY images from other sites onto your own, whatever. But directly linking to images hosted on another website is baaaad.
This reminds me of the NFL. They've got a new policy coming out about the usage of NFL news, interviews, clips and anything NFL-related. It's nuts. Just putting a link back to them wouldn't satisfy the issue. Here's the bottom line. Let's say you take my image and give me a link. You've committed an infringement on my copyright. You don't have permission to use the item. Not that it matters, but who is to say that the company/person even wants a link back from you? You know, a LOT of people buy and sell illegal drugs. A lot of people murder others. A lot of people rape others too. So, if we use the "others do it" logic in this thread, murder, rape, and selling/using drugs are all okay. A lot of those blogs are infringing on copyright. The manufacturer probably has no clue. And if that particular manufacturer does know and doesn't act, yet, it doesn't mean it's a free-for-all on all other images of the world. I can tell you that this is why I'm going to law school and plan to specialize in IP law. I want to sit around all day and do nothing but fire off invoices to people who use images (mine and clients) illegally. Hell, I might even donate X hours a week at no charge just to start hitting these blog owners. But, it can't be warning letters. No no no. Straight to invoicing for damages and lawsuit.
99% of people do not buy drugs. 99% of websites infringe copyright. Actually, it IS a free-for-all on any images hosted on the web. Do you host any websites? I bet I can find infringing material on them. Trolling, but I'll respond. This is why the Internet is so threatened at the moment. Are you happy to destroy the Internet to make a few bucks? I'm not being melodramatic. Think about what Google does. Google stores all your content, all your images, on their servers. They copy it - just like someone copying an image from your site to use on theirs. If this is made definitely illegal by a court case, *that means search engines are illegal*. Search engines being illegal = byebye Internet as we know it. There's already court cases specifically trying to prove this by the way. I can only hope that any judge is sane enough to not set a precedent that would destroy the Internet.
Yes, Technically theft is against the law in most places. Many people do care. If it were my image I would, wouldn't you? If I paid someone good money to produce for me professional quality marketing images I would be upset if my "one of a kind unique content" was utilized to brand and market some else's product. hell then when people come to my site they would say.."Looks like hes using the same photo from so and so's site" People do not have to issue you a "cease and desist order" first. I they can bill you, initiate collection and sue you for any profits you may have made, fair market value, damage to their brand and image or just usage fees.
We're talking about different degrees of copyright violation. In the situation you described above, yes the copyright owner cares. This is not the majority of situations though. I'll illustrate what I mean with an example. http://www.google.com. I've just linked to someone else's site without their permission, and on top of that have used a Trademark (Google, woops did it again) without permission. I've just committed copyright/trademark infringement. THATS what I'm talking about. Or, to bring it back to the original point about images. Lets say I'm making a site about roads. I go into google image, type in 'road', and copy the first image I see there. Its just a plain picture of a road. Woops, copyright infringement once again. Do 99% of sites do it? Yes. Does anyone care? No. If the site were of a specific product, and another site were using it as their own and making money off it, its a different story. Hell, I'll give you yet another example that I bet both you and the lawyer-in-training above are guilty of. Lets say you make your own logo in Photoshop for your website, and save it as a gif file. Woops, patent infringement there. Its something that almost 100% of websites are guilty of. Lets check the website of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (http://www.aipla.org/). Surely a bunch of American IP lawyers wouldn't make this mistake. Oh wait, gif gif gif... their website commits patent infringement.
I didn't know linking to someone's site was illegal? Did I miss that? I knew that linking to someone's site when they have asked you not too, might soon be very dodgy water to be treading in... but at the moment there hasn't been any precedents to suggest that this is yet the case. Also if you look at the homepage of the afore-mentioned search engine, the word you are reffering to is mentioned several times, with no notice of it being a trademark... and can you copyright a single word? Yeah, you have violated copyright... and you probably didn't need to, if you went and poked around then you probably would have been able to find a site that would have quite easily been able to give you a free image, with no copyright violations... Do 99% of sites do it? Well to be honest I haven't actually been around 99% of sites on the internet and I am guessing that probably you haven't either, so I don't know how either of us can judge, however I can say that everything I put on any of my sites is not copied from anywhere else. Some of us take pride in the work we do, and some of us do not, there isn't really a problem with that, but for those of us, who work on creating original content and not violating copryright, it can be somewhat offensive to be tarred with the same brush as those that do... If one day you said: "I own a website" someone turned round and walked away because they thought all you did was steal how would you feel? its the same principle on a larger scale, a scale which it might one day escalate to. And on one final point, and you may well call this nit-picking, but hey, both of the people you appear to be reffering to have actually been here longer than you, or I by nearly two years, and it does seem fair that instead of joining and trying to slag each other off, we could actually use decent arguments in a forum to have a worthwhile debate... Well that was a rather large post to just contain my 2 cents!
There have been some precedents set, I guess mainly by judges who don't understand the implications of what they're doing. They refer mainly to deep linking, but my point still stands with that if I'm linking to anything other than the landing page AFAIK. Here's some links I found. http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Appeal_Denied_Deep_Linking_Still_Illegal_Copyright_law_gone_crazy (US) http://slashdot.org/articles/02/07/05/1431249.shtml (Denmark) http://www.copycense.com/2005/07/australian_cour.html (Australia) Yes, "Google" is a trademark. Fair point, I don't mean to tar you with the same brush, it is of course a figure pulled out of the top of my head but its an educated guess based on using the Internet since the very early 90s. But please, let me ask you - are you using gif images on your site? If you are, then you have infact infringed patents. I don't call it nit picking, but I stand by my opinions. If I was somewhat disdainful of the post by marketjunction, its because I have strong feelings on legislation destroying the Internet. But, I did in fact present my argument in a decent and factual way, imho. Being new doesn't mean my arguments are less valid
There is a difference, between posting a link to a site, without permission, and posting a link, after being asked not too. Yes google is a trademark and at the end of the day, you could quite easily argue that you did not know that google were specifically against you using their name, were that to be the case. However, considering the fact that they are happy with the hundreds of sites on the internet talking about them, it would be acceptable to believe google would be ok with your usage. As it happens, i haven't used any gifs on my site... The internet is a constantly evolving resource. Hopefully soon, we can all work to remove the more serious copyright infringments on the internet, which would be a benificial thing for all of us. I totally agree that simply because you're new here, that doesn't make your opinions any less valid, considering I am relativley new here, I must agree. I personally felt that your posts were a little bit attacking... I hope I didn't come across too harshly, and I have to admit that I do find your posts quite interesting and informative
Think you are only a few hundred miles off target here. To be honest, we love it when people infringe our copyrights of our photos. Our photos have been used with and without permission by a couple of UK based magazines - with our permission we get on average £300 without we get on average £900 in an out of court settlement, we now just subscribe to their magazines simply to get a surprise pay cheque every few months (and lots of other photographers are finding the same)
Simply doing it and giving credit may not be enough in all cases. The smart thing to do is learn about "creative commons" and how it applies to images. Very often you can find exactly what you need in the way of images in wikipedia and almost ALL of them are subject to creative commons which means you can use them as long as you attribute credit as per the license, and to make it better, it costs nothing.