Copyright issue with images

[DanHorvat]

Hi all,

I'm Dan Horvat, owner of Oklade.net and this is my first post here. I'm trying to run the most professional betting website in Croatia.

The issue

I'm sure many of you need an answer to this question. 100% of the content on my website is under my copyright - except for the images. None of them are under my copyright except the (brilliantly designed) logo. I took them from the internet, google search, chose the ones I like, edited them to suit my website and that's it.

I'd have my own graphics but I'm not skilled enough to create it. Also, I couldn't possibly create an image of Champions League match unless I went there, got a press pass as a photographer, and took the picture.


What's the legal story with this? Is it copyright infringment?

A very popular website (ranked #45.000 on Alexa), F-Listed, says:

"All images that appear on the site are copyright their respective owners and F-Listed claims no credit for them unless otherwise noted.
If you own the rights to any of the images and do not wish them to appear on the site please contact us and they will be promptly removed."

Obviously, no charges against them.

Is this enough to avoid legal problems and, more importantly, not to make the author feel his work was stolen? The way I see it, websites with tons of images, who wanted to protect their content, put a watermark on the image.

While I worked in newspaper as the editor-in-chief, we had exclusive photos of one murderer who gave us an interview. When we published the article on the internet, I told the graphics guys to put the image in a very low quality (3-4 Kb) to avoid theft and use in other newspapers.

So, if you want to protect your images, there are ways. Yet not many people do it and I get the feeling images are mostly public domain. But, no proof for it.

I'm getting ready to apply for GPWA Seal, but my biggest concern is that I want my website to be 100% legit. For me. This seems to be a gray area and I'd like to know what do you guys and girls think about it, especially if some of you are more familiar with the copyright law.

Thanks!

[Doolally]

As far as I'm aware all images are copyright of their respective owners and cannot be used without prior written agreement. They are certainly not public domain.

Getty Images are one organisation that are currently actively seeking out misuse of their images. Do a search for "getty images copyright infringement" and you'll get a taste for what they are up to and prepared to do.

I guess the disclaimer you noted will help to a alleviate legal problems - it's easier and cheaper for someone to request an image is removed rather than sue them, but it's not guaranteed to work.

[MichaelCorfman]

From a legal perspective it is incorrect to assume images are public domain based on their being present on the web without a watermark or other clear marking on the image itself. You should assume they are the copyrighted material of someone and not public domain unless you have specific evidence to the contrary. You asked about the following notice you found on a site that said:

"All images that appear on the site are copyright their respective owners and F-Listed claims no credit for them unless otherwise noted.
If you own the rights to any of the images and do not wish them to appear on the site please contact us and they will be promptly removed."

Is the type of disclaimer I would expect on a site that allows site users to upload images. On such a site when a user uploads an image they are typically required to indicate that they either hold the copyright or have the permission of the copyright owner to upload the image.

However, in such a case it is possible for a user to make a false claim that they have this right, in which case the site could be in violation of the copyright holders rights by using the image. In this situation the community site is protected if they provide a way to provide notification that a copyright has been violated and act promptly to remove material that was improperly identified as OK to use by the person that uploaded the information in the first place.

The only legitimate exception allowing the use of copyrighted materials without permission (under US law) is when the use is considered "fair use" under copyright law. Fair use is a somewhat complicated topic, but in situations where an entire image is used as-is in a commercial context (to generate revenue) and is not part of an critique or review of the actual image itself, then the criteria for fair use are definitely not satisfied. To give some examples, fair use might be a few frames from a video as part of a review of the video or a screen shot of a game as part of the review of a game. Wikipedia has an article that goes into some detail about the concept of fair use here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use.

Michael

[arkyt]

I have always used xxhttp://www.istockphoto.com ... you can get an image of just about anything you need at a fairly reasonable rate.

[Justin-SA]

I think it is always better to be safe rather than sorry - however I had a website "steal" one of my photographs, and really saw it more of an honor than anything... but I'm one person, not a huge corporation that has the means to sue.

There are tons of copyright free images you can search for. Or pay for a small fee as well.

Reviews and such are obviously fine, but anything else I'd be careful and play it safe.

Hilary

[Renee]

I think everyone has pretty much nailed it when saying to check first...

Any content that you plan to take from another site, whether photos or even text, you should ALWAYS consult first..

Most sites who have reviews have either paid for them or have written them themselves and would not be happy if you simply took and used them. That's why there are so many threads around here about "someone stole my content"...
because that's basically what you've done if you haven't gotten their consent to use it first.

Cheers

[shortow]

Hi Dan

I really appreciate your honesty in bringing this concern up. There are plenty of Webmasters who seem happy to lift images first and ask questions later.

If you take the approach that unless i created the image then its not mine AND I SHOULDN'T USE IT WITHOUT PERMISSION you can't run into problems.

There are plenty of legit sources of images that don't infringe copyright. The obvious one is the casinos/sportsbooks that have plenty of creative they want you to use. Then there are heaps of good image libraries. I use Shutterstock which is pretty comprehensive.

Then you can simply ask the owner of the image for permission for use, or at the very least credit source with a link to the owner.

[DanHorvat]

Thanks for your replies!

shortow, giving credit doesn't mean it's ok. It IS ok if we're talking about Creative Commons licence. But, in case of Copyright, you can still get sued, I presume. Doolally mentioned Getty. If you steal an image from Getty and credit them, with the link and everything, they'll still press charges.

So would I if someone stole my content (without written consent), placed it on his website, and then merely gave me credit. The credit, in that case, would mean: "This article was stolen from Oklade.net and I think it's ok".

Copy right = the right to copy. Can't copy it without prior written consent by the copyright holder. You can, however, use a Star Trek image for writing a review article about Star Trek. That's "fair use", but the decision on what is appropriate and what is not is on the author.

On the other hand, if someone took a post from my blog, which is under CC licence, and gave me credit, then everything is ok.

If I'm wrong about any claims above, I hope you guys and girls will let me know.

[TanyaEverest]

One thing you can do is to prevent downloads of your images by using tables. Most images are taken through a right click-->"save as", but using images as a background to tables should help fix this. The basic coding would be:


(carrot)tablestyle=(quotation)background-image:url('image.jpg');width:Wpx;height:Hpx(end quotes><TR><TD></TD></TR></TABLE>(carrots tr)(carrots td)/tr/tdENDtable (sorry-had to mess with it a little for this to show up in the forum)

Another thing you can do is prevent search engine indexing of your images, like similar "noindex" or "nofollow" content tags:


(carrot)meta name="robots" content="noimageindex"></META(CARROT)< p>

<META name=robots content=noimageindex></META>

Also, if you are in the U.S, you can copyright your images at http://www.copyright.gov/ or get more international assistance at http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/b...ocs_wo001.html.

[Renee]

One thing you can do is to prevent downloads of your images by using tables. Most images are taken through a right click-->"save as", but using images as a background to tables should help fix this. The basic coding would be:

[ CODE HERE ]


Also, if you are in the U.S, you can copyright your images at http://www.copyright.gov/ or get more international assistance at http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/b...ocs_wo001.html.

Tanya it looks like your code has messed up the forum thread a little....
You may want to ask Steven to check it out.

Just a heads up that even if you put your image in the background of a table, they can still steal it by viewing the source.

There isn't really a way around it unless you use a server side code and "include" the image which would require a whole page for 1-2 lines of code, not really worth it in my opinion.. I'm not even sure that will work tbh because ive never tried it, but server side coding does not appear in the source of a webpage, so I assume it would work.

[DanHorvat]

I have decided to do it right.

I'll design as many images for my website as I possibly can, I'll take the others from free sources respecting their licence, and as a last resort I'll contact the authors for permission.

It should be a ton of work and it will take weeks...but then everything will be ok.