Can I Borrow a Cup of Sugar
Can I Borrow a Cup of Sugar?
Some Tips and Comments about using stock photos,
royalty-free pics, and other images in your blog posts.
One of the wonderful things about bloggin on the internet is the relative ease of combining the written word with a variety of image types to create possibly more interesting and/or intriguing presentations for other people to enjoy. Through sites such as Blogger, WordPress, and even our own beloved RedGage people can publish their own full-colour micro-magazine or newspaper!
However, while some folks get tongue-tied (or finger-tied) and develop writers block trying to type out the words of their message, others come up blank when they want to include an image to go with the text they write. Often these imageless folks resort to the internet in search of images to add to their post, and ... just help themselves to a cup of sugar to sweeten up their blog.
I recently read a blog entry posted to RedGage that was a bit short on words, yet it was dismayingly plumped up with about two dozen, some of the pics are quite large, sugary "stock photos" (sic) taken from a popular photo posting website. They did mention the site where they got the pics, but not who posted the images to that site.
Is that "fair use" of someone else's content? Maybe you are asking, just what is this "fair use" of other peoples' things on the internet?
If you ever wrote a term paper in school you know you are supposed to cite your sources. Same thing goes for posting on the internet! If you borrow something for your blog post you cite the person who created it or backlink to their website. In the case of a photo-posting website like say flickr.com or photobucket.com or any of the myriad others, it is not so much the website itself that should be cited but the "member" of that site who created and posted the photograph that should be cited or linked to in your blog entry.
It is generally accepted that a short quote or small image - ie a thumbnail - are OK to add to your blog if that content is relative to your blog and you backlink to the original person. However, quoting whole pages of text or displaying large photos is not in the spirit of fair use.
It is permissible to "fairly" use things created by other people when you present that content in certain ways. In my blog post - My 500th Post on RedGage - you will find small thumbnails of content created by some of my RG friends. This article was both a satire about stolen content as well as a promotion of my friends' creative content - a "relative" connection to the article. Clicking any of the thumbnail images went directly to my friends' content pages for which they received views (and monetary compensation). However, had I posted the full-sized images, even with the credits/citations and backlinks it would not have been "fair-use" because large images in my article would dilute the value of their original content.
An easy way to share things created by other people, either on RG or anywhere on the web, is the RG-Link. Through the RG-Link we can all fairly share the many wonderful things we find on the internet that have been captured and created by other people. RedGage even credits members with pageviews on the RG-Links they post and it adds to member earnings! If you look at the RGLinks I have posted, most go to artistic sites. I do that when possible to redirect RedGage members to the original artists when I find their content has been taken and posted incorrectly to RedGage.
Because RedGage does share revenues with their members we all need to be good friends and neighbors on the internet and promote the fair use of content in the RedGage community and all across the internet.
Thanks for reading this post - Cheers! MrBill
