Articles are dry without images, but adding images without regard for copyright is asking for legal trouble.
The Creative Commons licenses have provided a way for photographers and artists to share their images. Search engines including DuckDuckGo and Google have ways to search images by license.
But usually those licenses require attribution and a link to the license. Publishing the image without the required attribution is unauthorized use just as much as using more strictly-licensed material without permission.
The general advice is to include the image credits in the posts that use them as a separate step. There are several problems with that:
- it’s a separate step, so it’s a hassle
- it’s a separate step, so it’s easy to forget
- it’s messing around with unrelated content, so it introduces a source of errors
- it can’t be styled consistently
- no straightforward way to go back and look up the credits for an image already used somewhere—unless you duplicated work it’s sitting in the media library with no metadata about attribution or license
So I’m trying this plugin.
One more note: understanding that CC is a symbol that translates into 33, a favorite number of people who want me and everyone I love dead, I won’t be putting “CC” everywhere. I’ll set this up so that the credits look like
@photographername / BY-SA
where the photographer’s name links to the photo page (which will have enough information to attribute the photographer), and “BY-SA” links to the license. If somebody thinks that’s not enough, I disagree—looking at the legal code of BY-SA 2.0:
You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for, this License with every copy…of the Work You distribute….
4.a
You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying
- the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied;
- the title of the Work if supplied;
- to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work;
- and in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work (e.g., “French translation of the Work by Original Author,” or “Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author”).
Such credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Derivative Work or Collective Work, at a minimum such credit will appear where any other comparable authorship credit appears and in a manner at least as prominent as such other comparable authorship credit.
4.c
So when the hyperlink in the credit goes to a page with all of that information, and I’m writing the name of the Original Author and linking to the license, that is going to hold up without adding more noise to the page than necessary. If a visitor wants to know about the image I’ve given them complete information.
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