Happy Holidays! Can’t wait to rip out some tile in 2 weeks.

You know what’s funny about photos? Do the photographers ask permission to take pictures of the things they photograph? I don’t think so. I realize they have to pay for their overhead costs and such, but who goes out and buys a camera and says “I’m only buying this to make money” (with the exception of professionals who use their cameras to make money in a different way). People go out and buy cameras to capture memories. That’s what 99% of people with a camera do.

If you’re going around taking shots of things and only thinking to yourself how much money you can make off each shot, then you need to chill out on the whole entrepreneurship thing and find yourself a girlfriend.

Just go to http://morguefile.com/ and you can just use whatever with no restrictions or crediting or anything like that. It’s not a slick as images.google.com or flickr, but at least it’s free in every sense of the word…

I guess I see it like this: If the grimcracker started making money off of what he was doing with the pictures, that would be one thing, but all he is doing is basically the equivalent of finding a magazine, cutting out the pictures, pasting them together, and going “hey guys, look at this funny picture I made”. No one would blame him for not also tagging ” from Vogue and Maxim magazines, May 1998 page 87 and July 2006 page 35 respectively, by photographer Jim Briklimbaste and Gena Rightzikat respectively, used without permission” onto the end of his “hey look at this…” statement.

However, if he used the pictures in a billboard advertising campaign, that would be different.

Chill out people. Why did you start taking the pictures? For yourself? Then don’t post them online. For to sell? Then watermark the hell out of them. For to share with others? Then good! More and more people are seeing them and everyone loves them! It would be common courtesy for people to credit you, but if they don’t; the only thing it is hurting is your vanity. Get over yourself. They aren’t hurting you, you aren’t loosing money. Just be happy that people like them.

K, that’s my open source rant for the day. Flame away if you would like.

But seriously, you should probably seek CC licensed photos for LOLHeads. Especially when they go viral on Digg.

Brad, thanks for posting this information. I should probably start thinking about this a lot more when I post instead of just ripping off images. Can I be sued? More accurately: can I be sued and lose?

That means you can use those on your blog, as long as you follow the CC license.
So I click on the first one, and I see ‘Some Rights Reserved’ in the right column. So then I click on that to see what rights are reserved. And I see it has a “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic” license, then it tells me that I can share as long as I attribute it, I am not using it for profit, and I don’t LOLHead it.

So I post the image like this:

Image by Macwagen.

Seems like some extra work, but it’s not too bad.

So for example, for a Facebook App I would find the images I want on Flickr, then put together a quick ‘Licenses’ page and then have a small link to ‘View Licenses’ from the app, which would take users to: http://bradjward.com/lolcatbibleverses/licenses.html.

Also, it’s typically a courtesy to let the person know you used the image. Here’s a good example of one of mine that was used under Creative Commons licensing:
http://flickr.com/photos/bradjward/2003134665/
Someone used the photo in their story at:
http://www.nowpublic.com/sports/sports-hut-week-13-nfl-power-rankings

got it, sucka?

Thanks for the tip on the photos, Brad. I have also wondered the same thing about using them.