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| Source: Cepolina Photo |
If you're tempted to grab an image from Google Images to publish on your website without permission, think again. Images and photographs are subject to copyright, and many of the images on Google are not in the public domain. This means that someone owns the rights to an image as they would a piece of written work. If this is the case, then written permission from the owner of the image is a prerequisite for using it. So how do you find free and accessible images on the net? You look for copyright-free images in the public domain. An easy way to do this is to search the free image sites listed on Wikipedia. Another helpful place to go is the public domain image resources page.
Once you have found that perfect image in the public domain, you still need to cite where you found it. The general rule of thumb for citations is to credit the author and source. There are many types of licenses that allow you to use images, but here are descriptions of a few of the main public domain licenses:
Creative Commons BY (or CC BY)
Creative Commons BY-SA (Share Alike)
GNU Free Documentation License
Public Domain
Morgue File
Happy image hunting!
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