Web Worker Daily

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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