If you do any social media or content marketing, you’re likely using online images. What you don’t know about those images can hurt you. As a lawyer who has a substantial part of his practice dealing with copyrights, I’m here to tell you that one mistake can destroy your business. With a maximum penalty of $150,000 plus jail time, please be safe.
Copyright Law
Anything that is created is copyrighted. Therefore, any image you find online has a copyright associated with it. The copyright holder gets the exclusive right to determine how, when, and who gets to use their content. They automatically have certain protections, but if they’ve registered their copyright with copyright.gov, they get pretty extreme protections. For every person who uses their copyrighted content without their permission, they can sue for $30,000-$150,000 or actual profits. They can also get attorney fees. This is some scary stuff.
To make things worse, if you’re the one who downloaded the online image, you’re on the hook even if you have an LLC or other limited liability protection.
I’ve had dozens of clients contact me because someone is threatening to sue for copyright infringement if they don’t pay $10,000 or more. At the end of the day, my clients have to pay or risk the lawsuit. Copyright holders have a lot of power in those situations.
No-No Places
Whatever you do, do not take an image from someone’s social media, Google images, or someone’s blog and simply reuse it. You have no idea what the licensing is on those, so you’re basically gambling there. Unfortunately, ignorance is not a valid excuse in copyright law.
Good Place
There are actually a lot of places on the internet to get free or very cheap online images. My favorite is Pexels.com because they’re a community of people who release their images under a creative commons license. That means you can use it for personal and commercial license. Sometimes you have to give attribution, but that’s it. Almost all the photos I use are from Pexels if I didn’t take the photo myself. Another nice thing about them is their log of what photos you’ve downloaded. If you ever need to prove you obtain an image legitimately, you have that log.
It is always better to buy an image than to get one for free. It is possible that someone uploads an image they didn’t have rights to. In that case, you don’t have a strong defense because copyright law is strict. However, if you’ve bought an image, you have a lot more protections. Obviously, you have to take down any infringing images. However, buyers in the ordinary course of business have stronger protections.
Recap
- Get your online images from legitimate sites.
- Buying is better than free.
- Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse.
- All it takes is one violation.
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