Earlier this week, someone at work asked me to pull some photos from a Flickr community we set up (and that people shared their images on) so we could include them in a newsletter piece talking about a blog we’d done.

The assumption was that since they were up there, they were free to use and print wherever and however we would like. But that’s not the case, really, is it?

I wrote back - trying to be clear but not snotty about it - that just because the photos are up doesn’t mean they’re ours to share or distribute, and said that we’d have to contact the images’ owners to get permission - just in case. They’d probably be pleased to have them used in this fashion, but the last thing we’d want would be someone getting angry and upset - or threatening legal action - because we didn’t take the 5 minutes to fire off an email asking if it was OK to use their photo. Apparently, time was of the greatest essence and we needed to have the photos and permissions within an hour or so, so the plan to pull from Flickr was scrapped altogether.

It was interesting to me that in this day and age of (I thought) awareness of rights, permissions, fair use, copyright and trademark infringement, etc., that there are people (and people who are fairly tech savvy at that) who have gotten very used to thinking about the Internet as a huge source of free stuff and assume that anything there is free to use with no worries. There are guidelines for fair use - in terms of how many words from a novel or article you can use in a review or commentary without it being a case of you repurposing content or plagiarizing. There are pages and pages of information on any stock photo or stock art site letting you know how you can use comp images and alerting you to the differences between free stock art, royalty free images, rights managed images, etc. But the information is there, if you care to look into it and find out.

The photos on Flickr can be posted up for viewing by everyone in the world, but someone else distributing or using them without permission is an issue - and can turn into a legal issue. Some folks go ahead and license their Flickr photos under a Creative Commons License (you can select the type/level of license. There’s legal info to read through, but it’s not so dense that you’d give up. Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani answered a question about it back in March.)

More recently - Oct. 1 - the NY Times ran a piece about companies using people’s Flickr (and other such) photos without permission. There was a 15-year old high school student whose Flickr photo was taken and used without permission in a Virgin Mobile advertising campaign.

Anyway - yeah. I feel good when I’m able to say, “Hey - this is not a good idea. This is something that might cause problems - we can’t assume that we can just take stuff from people without their permission.” - and when that advice is taken.