People are Being Sued for Using Creative Commons Images
And it’s costing them thousands
Anyone who’s been paying attention to my occasional ranting about photography copyright infringement, might have noticed I’m keen to stay within the law on image licencing and I’m perhaps a little paranoid about it. This is mostly because I had to pay a £1000 fine once in relation to a colleague’s lax approach to picture licencing at work.
While you might think that using a Creative Commons image leaves you in the clear, it’s come to my attention recently that people are being sued for using Creative Commons images — and it’s not always because they’ve made a mistake.
Theft
In some cases, it’s simply because the image was stolen and the person who uploaded it to the Creative Commons website was not the copyright holder and was not authorised to do so. Essentially, it’s theft.
Kelley Keller writing for Small Biz Trends explains this well...
“A big problem with Creative Commons licenses is the fact that anyone can apply them to any work. For example, many of the Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, Google, and sites that aggregate images weren’t uploaded by the owners of the images. The Creative Commons licenses applied by the people who uploaded the images (but…
