Copyright and the Images on Your Website

The rule

Copyright exists automatically. No registration is needed, no notice has to appear on the image, and the absence of a watermark means nothing.

So the practical position is that any image you did not create or licence is presumed to belong to someone else. That includes images found through a search, taken from a competitor's site, saved from a social platform, or supplied by a previous web designer without documentation.

That last one catches businesses out regularly. A site built years ago by someone who used whatever was convenient leaves the current owner responsible for what is published.

What the licence types actually mean

Two of these cause most of the trouble. Royalty free is regularly assumed to mean free of charge. And editorial-only images are used commercially by businesses that did not read the restriction, which is a specific and common breach.

Creative Commons, read properly

The variants differ substantially and the conditions are binding.

Some require attribution in a specified form. Some prohibit commercial use entirely, which rules out a business website regardless of how the image is used. Some prohibit modification, which includes cropping.

Where attribution is required, it has to actually appear, usually near the image or in a stated credits location. An attribution buried where nobody would look does not satisfy the condition.

What happens when someone notices

Worth understanding because the process is more automated than people expect.

Rights holders and agencies use image recognition to scan the web for their material. When a match is found, a letter follows, usually demanding a sum well above the original licence fee plus a request to remove the image.

Removing the image at that point does not usually end the matter, since the claim relates to the period it was published. This is why the useful moment to act is before publishing rather than after a letter arrives.

Anything beyond straightforward compliance is a matter for a lawyer rather than something to judge from a webpage, and this article is general information rather than legal advice.

Where images can safely come from

• Photographs you took. The best option for a trades business by a wide margin, since your own work is more persuasive than any stock image.
• A photographer you commissioned, with the rights confirmed in writing. Commissioning does not automatically transfer copyright, so the agreement matters.
• A paid stock library, with the licence and receipt retained.
• Free stock sites with clear terms, which are legitimate provided you check the specific licence rather than assuming.
• Manufacturer or supplier images, where they have given permission, which is usually available for dealers and is worth having in writing.

Photographs of people and property

A separate issue from copyright and worth knowing about.

Copyright covers the image itself. Using a recognisable person's likeness to promote a business raises a different question, which is why stock libraries distinguish between images with model releases and those without.

For a small business this mostly arises with your own photographs: staff, customers, and anyone identifiable in the background of a job site. Asking before publishing is straightforward and it avoids an awkward conversation later.

The same applies to a customer's property, which is identifiable even when nobody appears in the frame, and is why permission is worth capturing as part of the job rather than chased afterwards.

Auditing what you already have

Worth doing once on an inherited site.

List the images, and for each ask whether you know where it came from. Anything you cannot account for is a risk, and the safe response is to replace it rather than to hope.

A reverse image search on anything suspicious will show whether it appears on stock sites, which is usually a clear enough answer. Images appearing on dozens of other business sites in the same industry are stock, whether or not anyone paid.

Then keep a simple record going forward: where each image came from and what the licence was. That is a spreadsheet with three columns and it turns an unanswerable question into a filed one.

The version that avoids all of this

Photograph your own work.

It removes the licensing question entirely, it is more persuasive than any purchased image, and it does not appear on four competitors' sites. The obstacle is habit rather than equipment, which is the point made in photographs from the job site.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.