Are You Stealing Images?

We typically do not install images on the blogs that we write for, or for that matter on our own blog. Part of that is due to time constraints and part is due to actively working to prevent a copyright violation. But this does not keep clients from following along behind us and adding photos of their own to our blog posts that we write for them.

Here’s one example, I saw an image on a new blog that we were doing and sent a quick email to our writer reviewing copyright law on images and asked where she had gotten the image. She was surprised one was even added to her post which means she did not add it but rather the client had.

Many clients simply do not understand that you can not just right click on an image your find anywhere, on Flickr, or even Google images for that matter. Someone some where owns the copyright and to just right click and grab the image is akin to stealing. You wouldn’t go to a stop and just pocket something and walkout. Why is it that people feel that you can just take any image they see?

When we use images we only use images from the Microsoft Clip Art Gallery and from iStockPhotos (where we buy images for $1 for a one time use). These are great places for inexpensive images, but never do we visit a site and right click and grab something.

Commercial businesses can end up in a copyright infringement lawsuit by grabbing someone else’s content or images. Why waste the time when the right thing is to create your own images or use legitimate resources.