We were talking it over the other day and have decided to make this little post.
Unfortunately we have noticed several sites taking images from here and not crediting where they came from originally. /we aren’t a big site yet in the community and none of us are known, despite what some amusingly think. A lot of money has been spent and other images have been contributed from the good nature of others and the least we want is for people to know where the images come from originally. Therefore we are working on some changes that we hope will not change the fundamentals of the site. This include:
- Putting a small watermark in the corners of all images
- Disabling some functions to download the image
- Adding a link to request a hi res version of the image with the idea that if the image is being used on another site that a link is clearly visible directing people back to here
We originally felt we could trust people to be polite to share images by linking to our site, however some honest mistakes have been noticed recently and the only reasonable way to . We wanted to avoid these measures, however we feel this should be enough
Also, we are starting to host photos from personal collections and people who have a private business of selling their images. Thus we want to make it harder for people to take them away from those originators. This also brings us to a copyright issue.
Whilst some question has also been drawn over the legality of the situation, our current stance is this:
- All images are hosted FOR FREE and the site is not profiting in any shape or form from hosting the images.
- Secondly, we do not post recent magazine interviews, our limit is it has to be at least 2 years old before we will consider it.
- Thirdly, the things we do host are protected under the use of fair use
- Lastly, even after all this we are still aiming to find the original producers of the photographs and articles to get their expressed permission to use the images. This takes time but we are working on it.
We want to ensure that nobody will be able to claim we are depriving anyone else of funds. We also do not want to profit off something that is not ours NOR officially released. This also works with the videos we are uploading to our Youtube page.
