Copyright Images

Don’t get into legal trouble that can cost you money!

Don’t use images you don’t have rights to in your surveys or questionnaires!

When you upload images, you should consider the copyright of the images that you are uploading. SurveyLegend does not and cannot accept any responsibility concerning images that survey creators upload and use in their surveys. It’s all the responsibility of the individual creator!

Note:

Most images found on the internet are copyrighted, and simply because you can find them via search engines does not mean that you can use them in any way you want. Make sure you have the proper permission and full rights to use uploaded images.

What are the rules for copyright of images and photos?

Copyright is a form of legal protection that is automatically assigned as soon as somebody creates new content. When it comes to photos or images, the moment somebody takes a photo or makes an illustration, s/he owns the copyright to it. The creators, designer, illustrator, artists, or photographers don’t have to register their creative works with a special organization, or apply for copyright, or even write a legal notice to the image. The rights to use, amend or sell that image are theirs alone.

However, they are allowed to give away or sell those rights, if they wish. This way they can also make money, and that is absolutely what they deserve! This simply means that no one else is allowed to use their works without permission, especially for commercial use.

Many people might think that if content is online, this puts the content into the “public domain”, thereby automatically removing the copyright. That’s absolutely wrong.

Online content is still protected by copyright law. If you’ve ever used images from the net and republished them in your surveys, without permission, you may have been breaking the law…

Finding free images using Creative Commons

Some photographers or creative professionals give away their image rights to others for free, under the Creative Commons license. This license, which is inspired by open source and the GNU Project approach to software licensing, makes it easy for you to use other people’s creative works, for free. But there are different types of Creative Commons licensing and some of them might require small things in return, according to their license.

Tip:

The most common type of licensing is an Attribution license, which lets anyone use the image in any way they like, as long as they give the creator credit. Which seems fair enough, and very generous. Therefore all you should have to do is include a link back to the original page where you got the image from, inside your survey in a visible place, and also to the creative commons license.

It’s also a good idea to contact the copyright owner, and tell them you want to use their image(s) in your online survey. They might give you the permission to use their creations under certain conditions. Just try it out! ;)

If you believe somebody is using your copyrighted images in their surveys without your permission, we encourage you to first contact the survey creator. If this doesn’t help, you can contact us via [email protected] and provide us with a link to the survey. Despite this, it is not our direct responsibility to control survey creator contents. We will try to help you inform the user, and get them to remove or change the copyrighted image.