Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Gregg:
You're not thinking that through. If you repost a blog, you're stealing it. I mean, you can do all sorts of things; you can even attribute it, but if you post a blog on your blog, in toto, you've infringed it. The same EXACT thing is true with a photo. Yes, people share them, but they share the links TO the photo, on the originator's page--not just lift the image and post it.
If you want to "share" images that you happen to stumble across on a Google search, you follow the image back to its origin, and post a link TO it. You don't copy it and then post it as if it's yours. It isn't. When you say this:
(italic emphasis added)
...you're thinking of a solitary photo as something akin to 10 paragraphs from your 100K-word book. But it isn't like that; a photo is a complete thing, an entire entity, just as is your book. You don't want your entire novel picked up and shared freely around the internet, right? Well, to the photographer, that photo may be a source of income, too. You can't know, unless you research the rights, I'm sorry to say. It's woefully easy to make off with images on the Net, and sadly, everyone does it. Hell, even I've inadvertently reposted some Ihascheezburger funnies, from time to time (but at least, thank heavens, those have the copyright ON them).
It's simple: post the link TO the image, not the image itself, and make sure you are allowed to before you do so.
(hell, I'm still tracking down a particular image I'm dying to use in a video. Even searching with Tineye. {sigh}. As the Stones said, "you can't always get what you want.")
OR, if you don't want to do that, limit yourself to CC searches (and be sure you check THOSE licenses, too--most are NOT allowed for commercial use, which, if you're posting them to call attention to you, your blog, all in connection with your BOOK, is still, arguably, commercial use.)
Hitch
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Hi Hitch,
Thanks for the response. I'm very careful about which photos I use. I don't steal anybody's stuff. And I hear you about a photo being an entirety in its own right. But posting a link on Twitter is pointless because it is the photo itself that I want to share. (Nobody is going to go to a link with my message of : Great photo of the Taj Mahal.)
And CC and Wikimedia boast that they have tons of public domain stuff but I need to research the individual photo's license requirements. That is such a waste of time. You search and search and search and find something you really love and, oh, sorry, that one the license says it can't be used. As far as I know (I have looked--if you know of one please tell me) there is no filter on either of those sites to isolate PD photos. Same thing with museums proclaiming they're all PD happy. 'Research the license of each individual photo.'
And of course
hardly anybody on FB or Twitter is using PD images and
hardly anybody is posting links to those photos. But when I was little I used to tell my Mom, 'My friend Brian is getting to do (fill in the blank).' And my mother would say, "I don't care if
the whole world is doing it. You're not."
So I'm cool.
