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Web Design: Photograph Copyright Issues
When designing a web page, you need to be careful about what pictures you use. Many people simply grab them off Google - they see a picture they like, and they put it on their web site. Unfortunately, copyright law protects the person who took the picture as the owner - if you’re not careful you could end up facing a lawsuit.
Copyright law gives rights to anyone whose creativity results in some expression - in the case of photographs, that means the photographer. If you don’t have express permission to use a picture or image on your site, you ought to be careful about doing so. Someone, somewhere, probably owns it, and they may not be too happy if they find it on your site. Many webmasters find out the hard way - they use hundreds of pictures, straight from google, without dealing with the owner. They end up facing a suit, forced to defend it or pay much more money than they made running their site back to the owner.
It’s actually relatively simple to avoid this whole mess. There are entire web sites designed to sell stock photos for web design purposes - just go to IstockPhoto or one of the other sites that sells them for cheap. You’ll pay a buck or two, but you’ll be secure knowing your site will never be shut down for violating the law. That kind of peace of mind is probably going to be worth a few bucks, and it also means you can know that any money you make off your web site design will stay in your hands.