 By Jonathan Steinsapir A common question clients ask me is whether they are free to use images found on the internet in their own works. For example, a friend in the printing industry recently told me that he used images he found on Google Image Search as part of a template he planned to show customers as sample business cards and stationary. He wanted to know whether using those images was kosher. (In exchange for free legal advice, my friend consented to me sharing his question.) As I am sure most people know, the answer was a very emphatic “NO.” Images found on Google Image Search, and elsewhere on the web, are usually protected by the copyright laws. As a general matter, you cannot reuse a copyrighted work without an appropriate license – i.e., without permission from the copyright owner. Photographs, whether in digital format or not, are entitled to copyright protection upon their creation. The same holds true for other digital artwork, such as drawings created in graphics programs like Adobe Illustrator. It does not matter whether the work explicitly states that it is copyrighted or contains a © symbol. In order to permit their works to be used more freely, many users of popular photo-sharing websites, such as Yahoo!’s Flickr and Google’s Picasa, regularly attach “Creative Commons” licenses to shared images. Both Flickr and Picasa allow users to search exclusively for content subject to a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making it easier for people to share creative works. There are many types of Creative Commons licenses, but a common one is an “Attribution License” – this allows anyone to use a work so long as the creator of the work is credited in its reuse. Another common Creative Commons license is a “No Derivative Works License” – this lets others freely copy the work (usually with attribution), but prohibits the copier from making any changes to the work. For example, you could freely copy a photograph you find, but you could not crop it, retouch it or otherwise edit it in any way. For more information about various types of Creative Commons licenses, and the way to tell if such a license is attached to a particular work, visit the Creative Commons website at creativecommons.org. If you want to legally use an image you find on a search engine or elsewhere on the internet, and you are unsure about its status, you will need to contact the copyright owner to obtain permission to use it. Unfortunately, there is no hard-and-fast way to find out who the copyright owner of a particular image is. I would suggest contacting the administrator of the website on which the image resides (not the search engine, such as Google, on which you found the image). This, of course, assumes that the website on which you found the image has permission to use the image in the first place. That is no safe bet though. Unfortunately, sometimes you are going to find images on the web that you want to use but you will not be able to secure permission to use the images or even to locate the person whose permission you need. In such cases, it is best to not use the image. The use of a copyrighted image without permission is against the law. And although the risk of actually being sued may be small in many cases, it is not impossible. And the federal copyright laws are no joke. Under the copyright laws, a plaintiff can sue you in federal court. The court can stop you from distribution or exhibition of your works incorporating the plaintiff’s work. You can be held liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines even if the plaintiff cannot technically prove that she has been damaged. To top it all off, you can be ordered to pay the plaintiff’s attorneys for their trouble. So, my advice is that when you have doubts about whether you can use an image, or any other copyrighted work, don’t use it! About the author: Jonathan Steinsapir is an attorney at Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert in Santa Monica, Calif. His practice encompasses a wide range of commercial litigation matters, with particular emphasis on intellectual property disputes. Page: 1 of 1 pages for this article
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