Jill Williamson is a chocolate loving, daydreaming, creator of kingdoms. She writes weird books for teens in lots of weird genres like, fantasy (Blood of Kings trilogy), science fiction (Replication), and dystopian (The Safe Lands trilogy). Find Jill on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or on her author website.
Copyright law is designed to protect the creator of a work from people using that work without paying or obtaining permission. (For a more information on copyright law, click here.) Copyright law is sometimes a very gray area, and it can be difficult to know when you’ve crossed the line. Here are some things I can tell you are blatantly illegal:
-Downloading pirated ebooks, music, TV shows, or movies.
-Using pirated images to make book covers, T-shirts, or any product that you sell or helps you profit (which would include advertising images).
-Putting song lyrics into your book without gaining permission and paying the appropriate fees. (The fees are not a set amount. Each owner decides whether or not to grant permission and how much to charge.)
So what does pirated mean?
From Dictionary.com:
pi·rate
[pahy-ruh
t]
I highlighted the definitions of pirate that applied to our discussion. But basically, it’s stealing. If you copy and paste an image or download it from online without paying for it, you pirated it.
So what can you do, then? What’s legal?
First, you need to understand fair use. The fair use law is designed to defend the user against a claim of copyright infringement when the subject matter was used to teach, offer criticism, or parody. (For a longer definition of fair use law, click here.) But you can use certain materials when you are teaching, critiquing, or mocking (in a kind way).
Teaching ( Give Commentary)
When I write blog posts, I often use images from movies in my posts. This falls in line with fair use laws. In the Go Teen Writers book, Stephanie and I were able to quote many passages from published novels without obtaining written permission from the publishers of those book because of the fair use law. We were very careful not to abuse this by:
-Using passages of 300 words or less.
-Using each passage as an example of something the author did well. (We never used a quote to say something negative.)
-Using only one example per novel.
-Citing the author’s name and book title with each quote.
In doing this, we kept everything in line with the fair use law.
Criticism
A writer or blogger offers critique when they write a review of something. This is most done in our industry in book reviews. You legally can post an image of a book cover for a book you are writing a review for. And you can legally quote a few lines from the book as well.
Parody
This is when you make fun of something. And here, you should be careful. Weird Al writes parodies of famous songs. But, if I’m not mistaken, he gets permission first to keep himself out of trouble. Some people just don’t have his sense of humor.
If you are posing images or animated gifs on your blog that come from movies or television, you do not need to get permission. A production studio could see it and decide to make an issue out of it. But they probably would never see it, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t take issue with it. Prosecuting such things is not worth their time and money. Plus, most these blogs only help spread the word about their book or movie. It’s free advertising.
I made a series of flyers for an event for our youth group once that used famous movie posters. I took photos of my husband and me and re-made the posters. This is another an example of using copyrighted material to make fun of or parody. Altering an image or video that is copyrighted falls under fair use law as long as you are not using the image for profit and as long as the image does not convey the idea that the original creator is endorsing you. Both those things are deceitful on your part and break copyright law.
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Un-famous Images
For pictures that don’t fall under fair use law, things get trickier. There are a lot of artists out there—photographers and graphic artists—who are looking to build careers. They put their images online, often on royalty photo sites like iStock Photo or Shutterstock. These are places where they can sell their images. It is illegal for you to copy and paste these and use them for any reason. It is illegal for you to open the image in Photoshop and erase the watermark. These images are for sale, and taking them without paying is stealing.
People download pirated ebooks, movies, TV shows, and songs all the time. And it’s illegal. And as authors, we should understand what this means to other artists. When it happens, the musician, author, or artist doesn’t get paid.
It can be difficult to know for certain whether or not an image is copyright protected. The only way to know for certain is to purchase images or to use images that have a Creative Commons license. To learn more about Creative Commons, click here.
It’s not worth my time to bother searching for Creative Commons images to use. But there are some sites out there in which you can find free images quickly.
Getty Images offers a wide variety of images that can be used for blogging without charge, and they make it easy for users as well. Simply let your cursor hover over the image and click on the embed icon.
Here are some other image sites to consider. Just make sure you read the Terms of Use for each site:
http://www.everystockphoto.com
Any questions about copyright infringement?