Hey nerds! One of the things we see time and time again is folks using images for their YouTube videos, their websites, just about anywhere—that clearly aren’t legal. We’ve known plenty of bloggers who end up getting served Take Down notices or taken to court over improper use of images.
Things To Remember
Something that most folks don’t get is that an image always belongs to someone and that person usually isn’t you—unless you took the pic yourself. The same applied to videos and music. Before using any asset in your project, you want to review the license information on the item to make sure you can legally use it in your project.
We like to use images that are licensed for Commercial Reuse With Modification. Not only does this allow us to modify the image in a project, but it also allows us to use the image, in many cases, without restriction. That being said, always evaluate whether you can use an image in your projects on a case by case basis.
And remember, just because it comes up on Google, doesn’t make it legal.
Our Demo
For more on this and a demo of the sites we use to source images, check out our video below.
YouTube
null
Resources
If you weren’t familiar with some of the sites we demoed and want to try them out for yourself, the links are below, plus a few bonus links:
Images
- Pexels www.pexels.com
- Pixabay www.pixabay.com
- Unsplash www.unsplash.com
- Stock Snap.io https://stocksnap.io
Music
- dig mixter http://dig.ccmixter.org/free
- Incompetech http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free
Video
- Mazwai http://mazwai.com
- Pexels www.pexels.com
- Coverr http://www.coverr.co
2 thoughts on “Just Because You Google It Doesn’t Make It Legal”
Terrific tutorial–as a performer who still receives residuals for movies I appeared in twenty years ago, I know how important ownership rights are.
But now I know that I’ve been searching for royalty-free images in all the wrong place. (And I used the singular on purpose there.)
Thanks, you guys!
Susan,
Thank you for stopping by and staying! Finding great images can be tricky. So glad you found the post valuable and we gave you a few new places to look for assets!
Comments are closed.