Want free Images for your website or project?

Please read this information, it could save you a large bill and stop you unknowingly breaching image copyright law.

The term “Royalty-free” – does not mean you can use the images for free. The term means you pay an initial fee for the purchase of an online image or a collection of photos, and then you may use the image(s) as often as required within the license terms and conditions without paying for the use of the image each time the image is used.

We have written this article to hopefully stop potential people who misunderstand image copyright from being fined for photo/ image copyright breaches.

Technology today means it’s very easy for companies who sell images to track unauthorised users down, the website you copied the images from may have copyright ownership but it does not mean because you copied it you also have ownership. In fact, even if the website or company give you permission to use an image from their website – it may not be theirs to give permission.

Just because a website uses an image either purchased or have paid for their own photographer to take and use an image, the image will have copyright, either from the company selling images or the photographer. 

Effectively even if you were a member of an organisation and you asked can I use some images from your website, they said yes. I bet you wouldn’t think to ask on what authority they gave the permission. AND that would not stand up if the original owner of the image pursued a copyright breach.  its simply not worth it.

Getty images copyright breach – £3000

Many years ago we had a client who innocently breached copyright.  The copyright breach cost the website owner a little under £3000 for two images, the size of a postage stamp.

Their client was Ray-ban and they copied some photos direct from their website. Turned out Ray-Ban had purchased the images from Getty Images.  Getty images employ a team of people to basically track down and pursue anyone who uses any of their images without purchasing a license. The £3000 out of court fine was reduced to £2400 if paid that day on the notice being served.

We had another case where the site owners did not know where they got the images from, they may have been copied from another website,  bought on eBay or scanned from a brochure, either way, they had to pay, or face court!!! 

Google and alike make it too easy to copy images, but don’t be tempted to do so, did you know the image could be copyrighted and probably contain code to identify it. If you use an image on the internet it has every chance of being checked for copyright breach. 

There is now software that creates digital “fingerprints” for images, allowing it to locate pictures even if a stealthy thief changes a photo by cropping it, resizing it, altering its colour or changing its filename. It then sends web crawlers scurrying through the Internet looking for images, trying to match them to the more than four million copyrighted photos in its database. 

The rules are simple

If you didn’t photograph the images don’t use them, If you don’t know where you got the images from don’t use them, If you did not obtain them for FREE  from reputable companies like Pexels, Pixabay, then don’t use them.

If you need images, buy them, it’s as simple as that ….and with companies like  123RF or Dreamstime which we use, they sell images from as little as only 95p it’s worth every penny, to get the right image and without costing lots of money.