In this final installment of this week's series on copyright, Dan Smith, shares rules for the fair use of images.
This week we’ve been talking about copyrights as they pertain to our online literary world—Easton and Kimberlee have supplied us with excellent education and guidelines regarding copyrights and content attribution, mostly as it relates to the written word. Here I will focus on images; where to find free images and 3 rules of thumb.
Where to Find Free Images
Usually the first place I go to find free images is Google images search (http://images.google.com/). Since Google mages just provides a list of images from anywhere on the web, be careful to ensure that any image you use from Google images is not copyrighted (which should be obviously stated in conjunction with the original source of the image). If it’s copyrighted, don’t use it. Similarly, Yahoo images search (http://images.search.yahoo.com/) is useful, though I prefer Google.
There are also a few other excellent sites out there that contain literally thousands of free images—great images, too—that you can use in any of your posts without worrying about license or copyright. In order of my favorites, they are:
- www.sxc.hu – you need to register for this, but it is free
- www.imageafter.com
- www.morguefile.com
And now the 3 rules for you to remember:
