Daylight Robbery! The Legal and Illegal Use of Web Graphics

What’s a Poor Web Designer to Do?

...how to legally dress up your site

Options abound for professionals and non-professionals alike. Assuming that you’re not a whiz at graphics design and can whip out your own copyright-protected graphics at the drop of a hat, there are plenty of other ways to legally dress up your drab Website. It not only matters what Web resources you use, but on what kind of site you use them.

If you’re creating a purely amateur, non-profit Website ("Hi! This is the Website for my cat Oliver. He loves visitors..."), then you should make a point to search through the plethora of free and almost-free graphics sites out there. Hundreds of generous graphic designers make their work available on the Web, free for the download. Often the designers will request a link to their site in return for the use of their work. Such material is called "linkware". It’s a small request and one that’s easily fulfilled.

The trick with some sites is to determine whether or not the sites themselves have the right to disseminate the works they display. The issue comes up frequently with fan sites of particular television shows or movies; sometimes these sites post screen shots and sound files taken from TV broadcasts in violation of copyright. Ask a Star Trek fan. Paramount, the owner of the Star Trek franchise, has taken steps to shut down some fan sites that use illicitly garnered Trek graphics and sound files. Other TV shows with large, active fan bases such as The X Files and South Park have experienced the same problems. While a fan site may provide graphics, sound files, script excerpts, and other goodies from television and movie broadcasts, those goodies may not be theirs to disseminate. If you decide to use material from these sites, you may well be in violation right along with the site owners. I’m aware that some owners don’t actively pursue copyright violations on legally owned material. That doesn’t mean it’s right to use their material.

There’s a similar issue with sites that compile collections of Web graphics, sound files, and so forth from around the Internet. Sometimes these sites ensure that the materials they make available are legitimately free for dissemination; sometimes they don’t. It’s your responsibility to make sure that the graphics you "borrow" from these sites are provided with the owners’ permission. If the site doesn’t say anything about the legalities of their collections, then it’s a safe bet to assume that at least some of the graphics and materials available on the site are not legally theirs to provide. Even if you thought you were using freely provided material, you could still be held liable for copyright infringement.

So how do you know who’s reputable and who isn’t? Well, the short answer is: you don’t. There are some generally acknowledged sites out there such as Art Today and Barry’s Clipart Server that are known to be on the up-and-up, though these certainly aren’t the only two. Another good source of free art is sites maintained by individual artists, who display and provide their own work, and only their work, for public use. One site I like is Digital Blasphemy – the artist, Ryan Bliss, provides some of his artwork free of charge for personal use, and asks you to join his site with a paid membership for access to the rest of his catalog. You won’t see any of Ryan’s work on my Website, but if you come over to my house, you might see one of his works on my PC desktop. Personal use, you’ll recall. In all cases, read –- don’t skim -– the terms of usage for each site. Some sites give you carte blanche to do what you will with the images: well and good. Others limit your usage, often warning you not to alter the images, or give you permission to use the images only on non-commercial or personal pages, etc.

Non-profit sites usually don’t run into serious copyright problems simply because it isn’t worth the copyright owners’ time to pursue the issue. Paramount could spend all day every day tracking down every Trek fan site out there and trying to get the owners to purge their sites or pay royalties, but it isn’t worth their time. However, a commercial site is a different issue altogether. Commercial Websites are much more stringently monitored and targeted for copyright investigations, for the simple reason that these sites are "for-profit". Profit-making sites are watched much more closely, and infringements are much more likely to be pursued by owners or their lawyers.

The problem for commercial Websites is made more complex by the fact that these sites are going to eventually need more sophisticated graphics and other Web materials than those normally available for unlimited use. It’s okay to use freely disseminated clip art and basic JavaScript freebies on an amateur site (note that many of these freebies come with terms and conditions that you should honor), but in most cases a commercial operation is going to want more sophisticated and specifically designed materials for their online presence. Also, as many freeware and linkware distributors don’t allow their work to be used commercially, commercial Web designers should be twice as careful about checking the legalities of anything they “borrow” from Websites to be used on a business or for-profit site. To get the more uptown Web materials they need, most commercial site designers either end up creating their own graphics and code blocks etc., or contract them out.

Whether you’re an amateur or a paid professional, good advice comes to you from Design Expertise, a Web design firm: