Stealing on the internet is easy. It takes very little effort for someone to copy your work and slap their name on it. Almost every month I hear of a photographer, blogger, or designer I know whose work gets used without their permission. With all this copyright infringement going around, I’d be surprised if a majority of WWD readers claim that this has never happened to them.
When it does happen, what should you do?
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I recently had an email exchange with a photographer. He was unhappy that I used an image from his web site on one of my blogs without a proper credit or link back to his site. I took a look at the blog page in question – from 2005 – and noted that indeed, I did not credit him or link back to his site. So I removed the image immediately and replaced it with a Wikipedia Creative Commons image.
The photographer was not satisfied. He asked that I pay him retroactively for using his image. I argued with him that the blog was not a commercial one, it didn’t get very much traffic at all, and even though I did not link back to his image, it was embedded using the actual image HTML code from his site so all anyone had to do was view the image to see the source. He persisted. After further research, I learned that I was in the wrong.
To find out more about photo rights on the Web, I turned to a lawyer, Deena B. Burgess, Esq., Managing Partner with the Law Offices of Deena Burgess, and gave her a few scenarios to comment on. Here is what she had to say.
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One of our readers writes:
I’m wondering what my rights are in terms of reproducing my own work on a portfolio-style Web site. I’m a designer, developer and writer/editor, and have been developing a site to showcase my work. Trouble is, much of it (perhaps even all of it) is now owned by other firms and individuals.
Given that, am I allowed to reproduce the work on my own Website for informational purposes? I wouldn’t be profiting directly from having the work present there (i.e. I wouldn’t re-sell my work to another client), but I could see how a case could be made that I’m profiting from it in the sense that I’m using it as part of my marketing materials.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. But I’ve been working with copyrights for decades now, so I’ve certainly got some thoughts on this.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
