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General discussion

Copyrighted material and getting a website started

Mar 25, 2008 1:17PM PDT

So my friends and I plan on starting our own website about video games. On lots of gaming websites you will have pictures above the blog posts of the game they are talking about. How do you know if this is a copy righted picture? What would we have to do to use these pictures on our website? Do we just give credit to the source where we found the picture, or provide a link to the site? Is there a place to find free pictures we could use on our site?

Discussion is locked

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I think providing a graphic
Mar 25, 2008 1:59PM PDT

of a game, dvd or movie would be OK, since those are promotional pictures. So if you added a pic of a game, it's just displaying what it is. It's different for painted pictures or pictures designed on a computer... those belong to the respective owner and may not be published without permission.

It's always best to contact whoever's picture you want to take.

There are free graphics available, just search on 'free graphics' and you will get a ton of hits.

~Sovereign

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re:
Mar 27, 2008 4:39PM PDT

IANL, but this looked like a good resource.
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/

Pay particular attention to
The Bloggers' FAQ on Intellectual Property

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It depends
Apr 1, 2008 2:36PM PDT

IMHO it depends largely on whether you give credit to the original and present the images at a lower resolution.

If, like Perez Hilton (http://www.perezhilton.com) or PITNB (http://trent.blogspot.com/), you copy full-sized images from professional photography websites, without giving credit, and ignoring their warnings. You will get letters from lawyers, and eventually get sued.

If, on the other hand, you present small thumbnails of referenced originals, like Google News (http://news.google.com/) or The VHT (http://www.thevelvethottub.com/), you've got pretty much nothing to worry about.

Using this as a rule of thumb, it sounds like your gaming site will be above-board. Good luck.