I want to find images to put on my website but I don't want to break any copyright laws. How do you guys determine what images you can use for your own websites? What websites do you use to utilize free images for your landing pages? Can i post an image on my website if i post it with an img src="http://source-of-image-website.com" tag? is that legal? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jay
I, personally, either ask the image owner for permission, or buy an image from a site like "stockphoto". That way there's no chance of copyright infringement.
umm,no.thats hotlinking.you would be stealing their bandwidth too. so what does this have to do with google,again?
There are some pictures online that can be republished, but for most of them you need prior permission. I guess, you cannot just download images from flickr and post on your blog, maybe. But if your server is located in Russia or China, then you don't have to worry one bit about copyright infringement... Just kidding... I hope some more experienced webmasters solve the confusion. Check out if there is an old thread on this issue.
Well, there's one way to be 100 % certain you aren't breaking any copyright laws or putting yourself in danger of being sued. Everybody and their dog has a digital camera these days. Make the images you want. Paint.net is open source freeware, a little brother of Photoshop, not nearly as powerful, but for web use, it will get a lot done. The GIMP is more powerful than PS in some ways, and also free open source. If you make an image yourself, you can be sure no one can sue you for grabbing it. Of course, there are some limitations to that, but without knowing what kind of landing page you want to build, going into more detail about that would just confuse things. There's an industrial zone in my district of the city; I needed a photo of it for my site. So I took my camera out and made one. I'm not trying to brag at all. Go look around Getty's site, look at the ones you would buy if money weren't an issue, and go try to mimic the stuff that you like about it. It's not like the film days anymore ... it got really easy. That's about the only you could use an image on another site. You could use an inline frame instead ... or even download it and host it yourself so you don't take bandwidth from the site it's currently on. But using a src attribute in an image doesn't credit the author; it just tells the browser where to download the image file from.
... or you use a creative commons image. Just about anything on wikipedia is fair game; they force people to "sign" away repro rights to images to add them to an article.