Legal Question

[ezdays]

There are other issues as well. The internet itself works under the assumption that the content is available to all unless otherwise specified. If you browse for images, you will notice that the professional block their images from being copied without their permission. Images not blocked are considered free for the most part, or simply require a link.

There is also the issue of outfits on the net like Photobucket, used by a lot of us. Once an image is copied to Photobucket, they relabel it as one of theirs, and they permit outsiders to browse your stored images. Therefore, nothing copied to Photobucket is considered off limits unless you make the effort to block off your account.

Acceptable practice is to post a link to the material that takes a viewer back to the source, if that is possible. It is not always possible to do that with certain types of accounts. It is also devilishly hard to contact the copywrite holders a lot of the time, leaving you with nowhere to go, even when trying to do the right thing.

I make every effort to follow the rules, but in the end, the final responsibility rests on the shoulders of the owner of the image, who has the option to remove the image from the open internet in order to protect, or to take the step to block the copy function. Failure to take either of those steps is de facto permission for the public top use the image under the general conditions described above -give credit.

Just to enlighten me, can you tell me where you found that information? I've never seen copyrighted protection of material specifically on the Internet defined this way so I would like to see that. I think some people assume this to be true and act accordingly, but from the way I understand it, just like anywhere else, something is copyright protected unless you define it as being in the public domain by telling everyone it is free to copy, or that it's actually old enough to have lost its protection and is actually in public domain. Some people do add watermarks to keep others from stealing their work, and that's an added layer of protection, others define that it is protected to reassure others that may not think so, but many people have no idea that another person has taken their photos or written content and copied it elsewhere.

No, I don't believe one has to "opt in" to protect their work, they can "opt out" if they choose, but regardless of where the material came from, a magazine, a book, a newspaper or the Internet, it has this layer of protection. My wife's book is copyrighted, and just because excepts are on the publisher's website, doesn't mean that just anyone can copy it for their own use. There are rules by which you can do that, but they are not that broad.