Time and time again clients approach us with a misunderstanding of how copyrights work with respect to images and content on the internet, so we decided to sit down and write up a definitive guide to it to help everyone out. This guide is about United States copyright law, but the general principles we discuss are applicable in most countries.
1. The best content is always custom.
Custom content will be crafted deliberately to your brand and the image you want to create. Be it video work, images, or written content. This will give your brand an edge when being compared to your competition. Unique content ranks higher in social media and search engine algorithms, and if you fully own the content you don’t have to bother with finding and paying for licenses.
For these reasons, you should always at least consider creating custom content before reaching for pre-made content.
2. If you didn’t make it, you don’t own it, and you can’t use it without permission.
Using content without permission is a form of theft.
This rule is probably the simplest, but it’s the one I see clients misunderstanding the most. So we’ll put this as clearly as possible: Within the United States, any creative content that is created by an author, director, artist, blogger, reviewer, reporter, musician, or any other creative individual or group is granted a copyright at the time of that content’s creation. No one has to apply to the government to be granted a copyright, they get it immediately when the work is created.
The copyright or individual licenses can be granted or sold on a case by case basis, but you need to approach every item you find on the internet as if it is the creative work of someone else who holds sole copyright. If you don’t, you’re likely to run into what is called a Takedown Notice. This notice is provided directly to you or to whoever is hosting your website (if you’re one of our clients this would be LVLUP Marketing), and it states that you must take down whatever content is outlined in the notice. If you refuse you are opening yourself to a legal action, so our default position is to take down your entire website and work with you to remove the content before bringing your website online.
The whole process can be more complicated than this, there are unscrupulous companies that submit false Takedown Notices, and there is a process to refute a Notice if you can prove you have a right to use the content but that will ultimately require mediation between the two parties or a judgment in a court of law.
So, let’s simplify this. If you don’t have the license to use a piece of content, don’t use it. If we know that you don’t have a license for content you ask us to use, we will refuse to put it up for you. If we didn’t it would open us to legal liability for your potentially criminal act. And that’s really the truth of it. Using content without a license to do so is a criminal act.
There is a fair use exception in the law, but one of the judgement criteria for fair use is if the content is used to generate revenue. If you’re working with us, you’re marketing a company, which means the content is used to generate revenue, which means it probably doesn’t qualify as fair use.
3. Google is not your friend in this.
Google and other search engines do provide some useful tools for narrowing down searches to primarily “royalty free” images, or ones that are licensed for re-use. However, just because an image is licensed for re-use or “royalty free” doesn’t mean you don’t need a license to use it. It just means that you may not have to pay for the license.
To complicate this further, large websites like Pinterest have been eroding the usefulness of image searches, so wherever you find the image may not be the original license holder, and may not be able to legally grant you a license to use that content.
Your best bet is to use Google to find a library of content that you can use. Any good library will tell you if a piece of content costs to license and what licenses are available for it. It’s important to check if the licenses available are commercial or not. Non-commercial licenses are not likely to be suitable for marketing purposes.
This blog post was populated with images from https://pixabay.com, which is an online image library of primarily free to license images, though it does show ads for paid libraries and allow you to search some results from paid libraries.
4. Free license content is usually harder to use
Licenses are a valuable business, so paying to obtain one is very common.
Selling licenses for content is a big business, and there are a lot of creatives who generate content and sell them to libraries of paid content like Adobe. It’s a pretty well known secret that what those libraries won’t accept, or things that are created by freelancers but for whatever reason cannot be used for a project, are frequently put online with free licenses.
This isn’t always the case, but it means that most of what you’ll find in a free license library is essentially picked over leftovers. It’s possible that there may be just the thing for you, but it will be a lot of hard work to find it in the first place. More likely you’ll end up settling for something that’s close to what you want, but not exact.
Paid licenses are likely to have more variety to allow you to zero in on exactly what you want, but as discussed earlier, there is no beating creating your own content if you’re looking for something very particular.
5. If it isn’t in a library, you need to contact the creator directly.
If you can’t find someplace that will give you the license for a work, or sell you a license for a work, your only option is to reach out and contact the creator of the work. If you are in this situation, it’s important to remember that they are under no obligation to respond to your request, provide you a license, or even otherwise interact with you.
When you reach out like this, you are asking the creator to give up some of the rights they have to the work and give them to you, which is not a small thing to ask of anyone. Treat them respectfully, and be fully prepared for them to refuse or to ask for a sizable licensing fee. Just as they are under no obligation to give you a license, if their offer is not agreeable to you, you are under no obligation to take them up on it. You always have the option to find different content or to create your own.
6. Finding and buying a license will protect you, but not always
Licenses can protect your business from costly fines and legal fees, usually for only a few dollars or a simple subscription fee.
There are people and organizations that sell fake licenses, people and organizations who sell licenses without realizing that they are no longer able to do so, and people and organizations who are ignorant to how all of this works. If you get a license it may not always be valid. Even if your license is valid, it doesn’t mean that you won’t have to defend yourself against a Takedown Notice.
Always license content with caution. Check the reputation of the person or library you’re getting the license from. Paid libraries are more likely to be under closer scrutiny which makes it less likely that you will get an invalid license or have to defend against a Takedown Notice in the future, although with the rise of automated systems you can never be absolutely sure of not receiving one, even if you are creating your own content.
7. Avoid headaches: never use anything owned by the following companies
- Disney
- Warner Media (Owned by AT&T)
- Nintendo
- Microsoft
- Apple
Honestly, avoid anything you would see on TV or in movies, and anything generated for a large corporation. Businesses of that size have the resources to be highly litigious, and are frequently in the business of protecting their Copyrights as fiercely as possible.
Conclusion
This article is a lot of words to justify a single point: if you found it on Google you likely don’t have a right to use it, and to do so anyway is illegal. If you are one of our clients, we have vetted and use several content libraries that we can let you look through, and we have to tools to generate content for you if you prefer. If you’d like to become one of our clients, we’ve been dealing with copyrights and other problems for businesses like yours for years: let’s get in touch. If you’re not one of our clients, Adobe has some quality libraries that you gain access to when you subscribe to their creative suite, and those are very safe. There are a number of other highly reputable websites that are only a little bit of research away.
The days of the wild west on the web are well and truly over, and you owe it to your business to make sure your content is on the up and up.
