Blog Training and How-To Guide for Business Blogging

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:

1. www.sxc.hu – you need to register for this, but it is free
2. www.imageafter.com
3. www.morguefile.com

And now the 3 rules for you to remember:

The first rule of thumb: if an image has a watermark on it, or a copyright designation anywhere near it, DO NOT use it without permission. You can always ask the owner/artist for permission to use it, but in my experience, you will have to pay to use it—that’s generally why they went to the trouble of watermarking the image in the first place. Clearly copyrighted images are simply not worth using unless you get free permission from the owner.

The second rule of thumb: if an image has no watermark or no clear copyright claim, you should be safe to use it. You will find many such images in Google or Yahoo image searches. If you’re unsure, then supply image credit via a link in your blog post. To see a great example of this in action, see this recent post by Easton.

The third rule of thumb: just use images that you know are copyright-free. We’ve already talked at length about where to find free, copyright-free, license-free images for your blog posts—these should be the first places you seek for images since you can use them without fear of copyright infringement. With using images, it’s better to be safe than sorry, and you’re always safe using explicitly free images.