Using Images Legally on Your Blog

www.inkthinkerblog.com — I got a very strange message recently from a whistleblower who informed me that a blogger was hotlinking to an image on my website. I appreciated the heads up, but I found the rest of the message to be quite odd. The writer gave me detailed instructions on how to insert code into my website to replace the hotlinked image on the thief’s site with porn. Um, what?

Obviously, I did not go the porn route. (What is the MATTER with people???) Instead, I sent this message via the website owner’s contact page:

Hi, [name],

You’ve hotlinked to an image on my site without permission in your post [URL]. I have used the image with permission, but that does not mean other people can then take it from me. You need to go to a photo site and download your own copy,with your own permissions, to use an image. Please remove the photo immediately, as you are stealing my bandwidth by hotlinking to my image, and are also violating copyright by using the image without permission of the owner. Your use can get you in trouble and can also can increase my hosting fees and get me in trouble with my host if I exceed my limits because of your use.

Please respond to this message to let me know you received it and that you understand what I’m asking you to do.

Thanks,
KristenKing
www.kristenkingfreelancing.com

Today, I received a very nice apology from the website owner, who assured me that not only had he removed my image, but he was also in the process of going through his blog posts and removing other hotlinked images because he had no idea that what he was doing was wrong. Among other things, his note said, “I would go to google and search a image and just edit it into my blog. I didn’t mean to do any harm as far as stealing bandwidth or anything like that, that’s just the way I was doing with images.”

This raises an important point: Google Image Search is NOT a good way to get images for your blog. Just as Google indexes webpages, it also indexes images. You can’t use the images freely any more than you can steal written Web content for whatever your little heart desires. You see, there’s this thing called copyright, and it protects writing, artwork, video, music…

When you DO find appropriate, legal images, you need to save them to your OWN server rather than hotlinking them. There are two key reasons behind this:

1. It’s rude to steal other people’s bandwidth, and it can cause major problems for them.
2. If someone removes their image unbeknownst to you, the image also disappears from your site, leaving you imageless.

There are lots of places to get images that are free for you to use on your blog or website. I’ve compiled a list of my favorite free and cheap sources for stock photography. You can also search Creative Commons for licensed images. Or, if you’re in a pinch, hit up Amazon for a book cover or product image that’s related to your topic. If you’re an Amazon Associate, you can get code to insert into your blog post that will include the image and link readers to the Amazon product page. Who knows? Maybe you’ll make a few bucks with that last one.

Whatever you don’t steal images or hotlink them. Images are great for blogs, but it’s better to use no images than illegal images.

(photo)

Tags: freelance writing blog, freelance writing, freelance, writing, images for your blog, free stock photos, free stock images, stock photo sources, creative commons, hotlinking, stealing bandwith, copyright infringement, inkthinker, kristen king

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