Busted! You copied an image on your blog that you saw on the internet. You didn’t think you were doing anything wrong but it turns out you were. The image was copyrighted and now the copyright holder is threatening to take you to court unless you pay a fee. That threat may be nothing more than bluster but you don’t know enough about the ins and outs of copyright law so you pay the fee.
How can you avoid all this by finding images that are free to use? Creative Commons is here to help you out. Creative Commons allows creators of original content to copyright their work in ways that permit others to use the work as long as certain restrictions are met. Many people copyright their images with a Creative Commons license that allows you to use their work for free as long as you give them credit when you reproduce the image.
How can you find these images? Google’s Advance Image Search has a drop down box that allows you to restrict a search by different types of Creative Commons license. Flickr has a similar search function. Now, Creative Commons has entered the picture with a beta version of their own search engine for finding free-to-use images.
The Creative Commons search engine gives you access to over nine million images drawn from 500px, Flickr, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and the Rijksmuseum. You can search through all or any combination of these collections. You can also constrain your search to titles, creators, tags or any combination of the three. Finally, you can limit your search to images that you can modify, adapt or build upon as you see fit, or that are free to use for commercial purposes.
If you find an image you like, you can add it to a list, tag it as a favorite or add your own tags. If you want to use the image, Creative Commons provides buttons which copy the correct credit as either text or html.
Creative Commons has been a godsend for creators of all kinds who wish to make their work available to others. Now, their new search engine extends a helping hand to people who want to make use of other’s work without being busted for copyright violation.
(Disclosure. All of the musical tracks I've released under the name Parametric Monkey carry a Creative Commons license.)
