A $4000 Warning about Using Photos from Google Images

Legal Lesson Learned: Copywriter Pays $4,000 for $10 Photo
http://blog.webcopyplus.com/2011/02/14/legal-lesson-learned-copywriter-pays-4000-for-10-photo/

Our web copywriters were under the impression that images on the Web without any copyright notices were “public domain” and therefore free to use. Naive? Yes. A notion limited to our copywriting firm? Definitely not. It likely has to do with the fact that works no longer need a copyright notice to have copyright protection (you can read about the Berne Convention Implementation Act, which the US adopted in 1988).

Designers, writers, developers, marketers, business owners, and ironically even photographers, use photos from the Web without permission. Sites like Google make it so convenient. Enter your keywords, do an image search, and you’ve got an endless photo library ripe for the picking. Woman laughing delivers 5.2 million photos. Business man offers 423 million photos. And the keyword kids brings up a whopping 778 million images. You can find pretty well anything, too, from ABBA to zombies.

To make a long story short, they ended up paying $4000 for using a copyrighted photo.

If you need photos for your website, I recommend Flickr. Use the advanced search feature and be sure to check the boxes that say "Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content" and "Find content to use commercially".

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Then, be sure to give credit to the photographer below the image or at the bottom of the post. Usually that means a link back to their Flickr page and a copyright symbol. An example of how I gave credit for a Flickr photo is in this post.

Another good source of cheap photos are microstock websites like this one:
http://www.istockphoto.com/

I haven't tried these, but here are some more microstock sites:
http://www.microstockphoto.com/
http://www.dreamstime.com/
http://www.shutterstock.com/
http://www.fotolia.com/
http://www.shutterpoint.com/