Moblogging, images and copyright issue
Moblogging become more an more popular since the last two years, and many people share images from their mobiles directly. Of course a greate resources for images that many bloggers will be happy to use ! But how legal is this ?
Jason Calacanis, written after launching autoblog.com
The launch of Autoblog.com was accompanied by a lot of excitement and, unfortunately, some legal headaches. Turns out someone didn’t like our use of their photos and it looked like the legal guns were about to be drawn.
Legally speaking there isn't really a solution, so to avoid administrative tasks before getting permission, here is a small advice that work and avoid you law pursuits. We should be aware that image are part of intellectual property even if its taken by a small digital camera.
- First try to contact the author for permission to use his images
- When you use any images just link them to the original author
- Add a notice in your website that image are copyright of their own authors
If you have a search engine, maybe you'll choose the Google model they manage crawling for images. In fact Google don't worry about any copyright issue, but to prevent your images from being crawled you have to edit your robots.txt file and add
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
Probably this technique could be used by bloggers also, so you can check if there is a robots.txt file on the site that you want to use images. If you saw any Disallow so you try to avoid using images from there otherwise you can use them and name their original author.
Some websites use just a general copyright notice for example ( ©2005 XYZ ) without any further details, and no contact informations ... etc. I don't see why they will be against use of their images specially of you link them with the image used.
