You heard all throughout school about the penalties of plagiarizing your work. Well, the same rules apply for business owners, social media promoters, and content creators. Whether you’re trying to create a nice thumbnail, finding a photo for a blog, or more, you need to identify if you have permission to use the image. We want to cover why using a picture without permission isn’t a risk worth taking.
The first thing you need to know is: using a picture without permission could leave you with hefty fines or worse. As great as the internet is, it reveals opportunities to steal work. It’s often difficult to tell if a site has permission to use pics/art. Other than a nice request for you to take the image down, there are other consequences that could result in much worse than embarrassment.
Some of these include, but are not limited to, a lawsuit, SEO rankings being negatively affected, ruining of your brand and reputation, and more! Depending on the situation, some photographers won’t be as hard as others, but that doesn’t create any excuse for you to steal their work. Fines can range from small fees to thousands of dollars, along with possible time in jail. Do you really think it’s worth the risk of finding yourself in a troublesome situation when stock photos can be purchased for a few dollars or even free?
What are stock photos?
What are stock photos? Stock photos are images available for use from certain distributor websites. All you have to do is pay a fee for the photos. What sounds better to you, paying a very small price for photos, or dealing with the penalties we stated above?
We want to recommend a few stock photo websites for you to use.
Two stock photo websites we personally have experience with include Pixabay.com and Depositphotos.com. We’ve used these for plenty of projects. They both have a wide variety of images you can choose from. Pixabay.com offers free stock photos, so you are free to use them without paying for them, but if you’re looking for a specific photo, you may not find it on Pixabay. Depositphoto.com does charge a fee, and offers more professional photos to purchase. It’s best for you to check these websites and see what they have to offer. Some other popular stock photo websites include Shutterstock, Getty Images, and there are more you can find online with an easy Google search.
Unless you took the photo yourself or you paid for it, we recommend avoiding using any photo without permission.
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