Photos Images and the Law

Voightander Camera

For my next blog paranoia post I'm looking at the issue of images, photos and pictures. Everyone has surely heard the phrase pictures speak a thousand words, and that to make a article interesting you need an image or two just to distract the eyes for a little. But I'm not an artist, and whilst I do take photos I don't have a whole stock of them ready to use. So like most lazy writers I tend to rely on the internet to find relevant pictures. But I'm vaguely aware that this may not be the right thing to do and whats more I do feel for the original artist. They have gone out of there way to create the work and it is clearly of high quality as I am prepared to use it for my own purposes, yet I have no idea what the etiquette is for taking someones work and reusing it. So in this post I intend to explore those in a little more detail. Also to note my sincere apologies to the artists responsible for the 3 pictures
I have already used. Once this post has been published I will go back and amend appropriately.

Law

Unknown students in jail

Copyright is the most obvious legal issue with photos since the Berne convention all images are copyright protected which prevents an image being used without permission or adapting the image without permission, even re-creation of an image is prohibited. There is no mistake that even small independent personal blogs are covered by copyright laws, so any image I use must be published with permission, otherwise the law may be on my back.

Its not a case of whether the image is free or if its been paid for, the issue is ensuring that you have permission to use the image, you can find a free image that you are aloud to publish or you can pay for an image and then use it for a non-agreed purpose.

Then there are laws relating to image rights of an individual, where even if you have a copyright agreement, you don't necessarily have permission from the person in the image. But that is the best left for a future post and in the meantime i won't publish pictures of people (ignoring the 2 students above). Likewise companies have laws protecting their images too so anything covering trademarks also off limits for the time being. I've also just read that certain buildings are covered by trademark too, so no pictures of buildings either. There doesn't seem to be much left for the poor well intentioned blogger.

There is however a term that keeps cropping up and that is :-

"In the public Domain"

The concept of a public domain is that if something is available to everyone then it is owned by everyone and controlled by no one. So doesn't this imply that if an image is on a free search engine then it is a free image and in the public domain. Well actually no it doesn't, images on the internet are widely available but still retain ownership.

Dollars

Free images

Yet despite all of this there are free images allover the internet, and some artists declare that the image is free to use, either by everyone in all circumstances or by providing some conditions. Whilst i can see there is some benefit of this in the case of an aspiring artist or a company wanting to draw attention to itself, i'm not certain how you can be sure that the image you have is truly a legal image.

Creative commons images

I have discovered one source of free image, Creative commons Images. Creative commons is a not for profit foundation who have created copyright licences which allow artists to licence their work for use by others at no charge. Some of the licences still contain restrictions and if you breach them your still liable under copyright laws, but essentially these creative commons licences give you the opportunity to gain permission from the artist to use an artwork.

But even these images are not without issue, the Creative commons organisation it not party to the agreement and there is no way to be sure that just because a website says the image has a license there is no way to ensure the original artist has authorized it. Creative commons also doesn't get you around image rights and trademark issues. But short of taking lots of poor quality camera phone pictures this seems like my best option. All of the images for this post have been taken from wikimedia.org which hosts both creative commons and public domain images.

Orphaned images

One last thing to note is this rather controversial term, Orphaned Image. Its controversial because its a relatively new concept that is seen by some to completely undermine the copyright laws described above, from my limited understanding the concept essentially implies that it is ok to use images that have been orphaned, in so much as that the original owner is no longer traceable, and in this sense the image is now commonly owned. Whats more it provides a level of defense for individuals and organisations as it appears that all you have to do to declare an imaged orphaned is to make an effort, to identify the owner. If you can't then go ahead and publish. Whats more it seems that you can then assume ownership of that image and re-sell it. It all seems somewhat underhand to me for the moment so I intend to steer clear until I have some time for more research.