Copyright

Copyright on the Internet is a frequently misunderstood concept – just because a picture is on a website doesn't mean that it's in the public domain. Just as if it were published in a book, a photograph published on a website remains the copyright of the photographer or publisher (depending on the licensing agreement between the two parties) unless explicitly licensed otherwise.

There are exceptions, such as for critical commentary, which is how I can legally use the pictures from people like Zoe Strauss I've used in my older posts, and even then they require attribution. This doesn't mean I can use them for any purpose, or take them and use them in my own work as some have claimed. The only pictures on this blog that are not attributed are those that are my own images (I'm not going to sue myself!).

There is a more recent class of licensing though that sit between the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright and the “no rights reserved” of public domain. Collectively these are called “copyleft” licenses of which varying subsets are often called “Free” licenses (and here “Free” means “libre” or “free as is speech” rather than “gratis” or “free as in beer”). These licenses allow a much finer control of what you allow other people to do with your work. Perhaps the most widely known are the family of licenses produced by an organisation called Creative Commons, also known as the “cc” licenses. These contain mix-and-match elements that allow you to share your work without giving all control away. For example, Wikipedia and many of the images on it are licensed under the “cc-by-sa” license, the “by” meaning that all users must attribute the authors/artists/photographers, and the “sa” standing for “share-alike” which means that all re-users must also share the work and any derivative versions under the same terms.

I licensed this image of the Bridgnorth Cliff Railway under the cc-by-sa license in 2005. It now illustrates the Wikipedia article, and was recently published in Heritage Railway magazine.

In my view this is a good way to get yourself known, and to provide something for the world community, particularly for images you do not intend to make money off – although there is nothing stopping you from earning money for images you place under a free license.

Copyright law is something that can the subject of a lifetime's study, so nothing here is the last word on it – as the popular phrase on internet discussion fora has it, “I am not a lawyer”.

References: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

http://creativecommons.org/

Strokes, Simon, "Art and Copyright", 2001

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgnorth_Cliff_Railway