How to use Public domain and Creative Commons photos in your articles

It is easy to find images on the web and the temptation to use a nice image we see is quite often strong. Unfortunately, if we use any photo that doesn't belong to us without having bought the rights or having the explicit consent of the photographer or owner we are risking copyright infringement.

Many photographers will not object to a fair use of their work when the sample used is in a low resolution and used to publicise their work or portfolio. They do object, and occasionally very strongly (and quite rightly so), if their work is taken without permission to illustrate an unrelated article, especially when there is advertising in the article.

Photo by alexkerhead Some rights reserved

There are two solutions to this problem unless you are prepared to buy rights to photos or wait for photographers to give you permission (which they might not give you anyway).

The first solution is to use Creative Commons licensed photos and images. There are different types of Creative Commons licenses, the ones I would recommend if you intend to monetize your articles is the three Creative Commons licenses that allow commercial use. What you need to do is credit the photographer's name or username, link directly to their original work and cite the type of CC license their work is under.

To find Creative Commons photos and images safely I suggest Wikimedia Commons which has over 7 millions images (always read the license carefully for every item you wish to use as not all images on Wikimedia can be used for commercial work).

Alternatively I also recommend Creative Commons Search which will search for you images that you can use commercially (if you tick the relevant option next to the search field) on Google Images, Flickr, Yahoo and Wikimedia. This is at the moment my favourite Creative Commons search engine.

By Public Domain we mean that no one has the copyright for these photos and images. It can be difficult to establish what is actually copyright-free as copyright laws vary from country to country. A few general rules are:

In the U.S. anything created before 1923 is in the public domain. Also U.S. Federal Work is copyright-free. In the U.S .reproductions, scan or photos of any work of art whose copyright has expired if they lack originality would also be in the Public Domain. Therefore a photo of Leonardo's Mona Lisa or a scan of an old postcard would be in the Public Domain.

In other countries copyright expires generally 50 or 70 years (the latter is the case in the EU) after the death of the author.

When using Images in the Public Domain found online it is good practice to give credit to the source as someone has taken the trouble to scan and upload those images.

A few ideas where to find images in the Public Domain can be:

Yestercards a large collection of vintage cards celebrating several holidays.

Library of Congress contains lots of images and photographs in the Public Domain but you need to check the license next to every item.

A Community-Indexed Photo Archive Around 27,000 Public Domain photos. There are some rules on the front page, read them before you use any images.

Free Public Domain Photos several thousands photos that you can use for free provided you link back to the source.

The Best Copyright-Free Photo Libraries A Search engine for images and photos found in the U.S. government archives which are in the Public Domain.

Public Domain Photos besides photos it also has several thousands free clip art items.

Otherwise another good tip is to search for Public Domain photos and images on Bing search engine. Just search with your keyword followed by the words Public Domain as in this example.

From Old Books a few thousands images scanned from old books.

When looking at what people search to find this page I see that many search for "are Google images in the Public Domain"? The answer is NO. Google Images are not free to use unless you specifically search for images that can be reused freely, as for instance Creative Commons photos but in a standard search the vast majority of results in a Google Image search will be copyrighted images and therefore not free to use.