Not that, in our current Photobusted state, there’s much glory to go around, but still.
The sharp-eyed and sharper-brained among you will notice that not long ago I began making my images live links to their source websites (at least for the first occurance; after that it gets harder to keep track). It seems to me that this is the least I can do for the people who make and upload images, and it gives them a bit of the Googlejuice; also, I’ve yet to have a complaint about it.
It all started in this post, which was linked to by ECNPA, a photography association, some of whose forum members became seriously irate that I’d used the images at all. As you can see from the first comment, the photographers in question weren’t nearly so outraged, but it nudged me into thinking about ways to give credit where credit was due: after all, always I do that for text, no exceptions. Why should other art forms be treated differently? And this was the best workaround I could come up with; it shows the image in context and has, at least once, resulted in a commenter leading us to the actual, original source, rather than the bogus blogscraper that I’d gotten it from originally.
So I’d encourage people to post images, and to properly accredit those images with a link. The webmasters will like that as well. The photo agencies currently suing Perez Hilton have publically stated that if they had only been given credit for the photos this wouldn’t have gone to court, and I for one will take them at their word although it must be said that it’s much easier for someone dirt poor to face a lawsuit because the entire realm of monetary awards resides entirely in the theoretical sphere, and everyone knows it. They may or may not be sincere.
Still, picture it:
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raincoaster 
9 x out of 10 i create my own images for my site or i pluck them from a news source where they are already *out in the public* as it were.
i do NOT like linking directly to other web sites because everyone cleans house once in awhile and i don’t want someone to keyword onto an old post of mine only to find all the links leading to dead pages.
one thing i reallllly like about wordpress is that it allows you to host your own images. my site isn’t quite as image-heavy as yours, but it’s got its fair share and i am only using 4% of my free storage space thus far (and i can opt to buy more)
so i use wordpress to host my regular images (the ones i use repetitively and the ones that go on my pages) and photobucket for my per-post images.
though if i ever get popular enough to exceed band-width i might have to find a different option, because that would just bug me to no end.
FWIW Wikipedia has a linked resource of Public Domain images here.
There’s huge amount of stuff that can be used for free, and mostly the owners only ask for attribution.
I think you’re misunderstanding me, branamin. I am not and would not hotlink to pictures other people are hosting : someone did that to me, and thats why all my pictures are down. What I do is copy the image, host it myself, but format it as a link to the original source pages so people can see where it came from in the first place.
Images on news sites are IN NO SENSE out in the public. Taking images from news sites is what got this whole thing started in the original thread; the news photographers’ association blew a gasket!
So, if you take images from another site, what do you do to credit them?
Not incidentally, this policy of mine makes it far easier to fix things when stuff goes wrong, like now. If onlyl I had ten hours of uninterrupted web time I could fix all the images on most of my recent posts, because I could see where I got them in the first place!
I wonder how newspapers work with material that they source? There is credit for the pictures, but do they pay as well?
And do they pay for articles that they use from AAP or Reuters, or are they on some kind of subscription basis?
I try not to use other people’s pix unless I have their permission, or at the very least give them full credit and a link. Sometimes I swipe a pic for elements in another image (I used some ‘fire’ in an image recently that was pinched and integrated into something different) but I figure that exists under the banner of ‘montage’. Probably not an excuse, but hey.
Being an image creator myself, I’d get antsy if someone used my images without permission, but I’d probably be totally OK if they asked me first. I wouldn’t even feel bad if they just credited me (both these things have happened). But I feel pissed off when they just use an image, and especially annoyed if they hotlink without any credit. That happened to me once from a huge kids site called Neo Pets that hotlinked one of my images as a background image on their site index page.
I suddenly got a bandwith warning from my host – there were literally millions of accesses to my site.
So even big people who should know a lot better can be guilty of bad behaviour.
@ raincoaster
ah. i did misunderstand you then.
the pics i use from news sites (for instance i snagged a picture of a house covered in snow from upstate new york earlier this winter) and other sources i make into a link, just as you said : :
you click it and it takes you to the original site, original image/article/whatever . . .
i thought you meant piggybacking with the original site. my apologies.
@ anaglyph
as to *sampling* so long as you have altered the original by at least 10% (i don’t really know how they figure that) it is considered new material, copyrightable only by you (or those you designate)
not a perfect system, but useful to know should anyone ever cry foul.
as much as possible, i like to create my own images, but i do sample from time to time and if there is a major contribution (like my *faith of the faithless* icon) i work something out with the original artist.
Newspapers pay for the pictures they use: they pay quite a lot indeed. And they are on a subscription with Reuters, AP, etc, so they pay a monthly retainer for the right to use articles and may pay by the piece as well, depending on the contract.
FYI “montage” is a defence in court that stands up, at least when it’s clear that the image has been manipulated enough that it is recognizably different from the original. As for the Neopets webmaster, that was just shockingly amateurish. Really, someone who would do that should not be in charge of such an important site.
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