Just Because Something Is Online Doesn’t Mean It’s Public Domain

The above pic­ture has noth­ing to do with this article.

A few weeks ago I was hav­ing a dis­cus­sion with one of my fam­ily mem­bers about web site design and blog­ging.   He stated that he was going to be start­ing some sort of manga/anime fan site based on a cer­tain char­ac­ter.  I stated that he should be a bit wary about the images he used that he may have to worry about copy­right issues since the images were trade­marked and copy­righted.   Keep in mind this was the same brother that wanted to setup a web­site for a girl so you couldn’t down­load the images (and I called him out on the futile nature of that).    Kind of ironic when he wants to con­trol it, he thinks one way — but when he wants to use it he thinks another.

Another fam­ily mem­ber piped in that they thought if it was online it was pub­lic domain and free to use.   Now I cor­rected them, but so every­one else knows — just because some­thing is pub­lished online doesn’t mean it’s free to use.   When I don’t use my own pic­tures I always use cre­ative com­mon licensed images and put an attri­bu­tion link beneath the image (some­times I do use pub­lic domain images and don’t attribute).   I even had an online scuf­fle with some­one who licensed her work via cre­ative com­mons and didn’t know what it meant.

I gave my fam­ily the two minute off the top of the head review of cur­rent copy­right law and how creator’s rights worked under our borked legal sys­tem.   Essen­tially if you are in the US any­thing made 1923 or ear­lier is free game — any­thing after that is the life of the cre­ator plus sev­enty years.   Unless the page it’s on states oth­er­wise you have to assume the work is copy­writ­ten.   Then we get into fair use, which is a whole other ball of wax entirely that I’m not going to touch right now.