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Image/multimedia copyright and posting questions.

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Jun 17.2009

I am building a site but so far I have no images or video, sound or any real multimedia on the site, mainly because I am scared of eventually getting sued.

On my site I often make references to things in pop culture, actual people, well you know all sorts of people, places and things. Yet I never really have any pictures to go along with it so people are often kind of left in the dark. I also want to use images to decorate my site or use as backgrounds

Yet I am not sure how the whole image copyright thing works, what I can post, what I have to upload to my own servers, what I can link from other pages, what kind of copyright statement do i have to make on my stuff, all kinds of legal stuff like that. Or even in what context can i use these images?

Also does opening a store on my site effect any of this?

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@tracknutJun 17.2009 — This is a huge issue as you can imagine, and it's good you're thinking about it now, before you post. Here's a brief overview, I am not a lawyer...

Firstly, the copyright on a photo or video belongs to the creator/photographer of that image. That person can license the image for use, or can even sell the copyright itself (rare). So to use someone else's images, you need such a license, which may be as simple as an email stating that you have permission to use the image on your web site. If you have no license, it is not legal to use someone else's image.

Secondly, once you have the license, or if you were the photographer yourself, you must address the question of rights to *use* the image. Typically this is rather open, other than for commercial (advertising) use. So you could post that image on your site, but you couldn't make an advertising campaign using the image without a contract with the person in the image.

I don't think a store on your site affects the copyright/usage issue one way or the other.

That's an extremely simplified version of the issue, and if this is the cornerstone of your web site, I would certainly engage a lawyer to go through the specifics in your case.

Dave
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