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A point of clarification: I was not upset at all over the fact that the documents were protected. What annoyed me was the fact that I had been using the images for a number of months with no notice or response from Pixabay.com and suddenly they put their notice on all the images going back months. If they had given the notice immediately, I would not have been making the same mistake over and over again.
When I use images that are not my own, I either scrupulously abide by the copyright and license restrictions or use image clearly in the public domain. I found a website, Pixabay.com, where the images are clearly marked as "Public Domain." I used quite a few of their images over a period of time and had no problems. Then suddenly, the website retracted all of the images and put up what was essentially an advertisement in the place of each photo and further implied that I had used the images improperly. As a result, I have gone back through my posts and removed all of the photos I could find that came from that website.
If you come across a blacked out photo on any one of my posts, please leave a comment to that effect and I will immediately remove that photo. Thanks for your cooperation.
I suggest that extreme caution should be exercised in using any images that are not clearly marked as in the public domain or that are old enough to be out of copyright.
The images themselves may still be in the public domain. The issue was that to keep load off their servers they wanted you to download the the images to your local system and then host them on your site or a site. Instead of what is called hotlinking to their site. https://pixabay.com/en/service/faq/. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotlinking if you wish you may also upload the images to a site that does allow hotlinking.
ReplyDeleteI use them also, James, and though they say that it is not necessary to acknowledge them, I always do. So far, no problems, but I will keep checking. Thanks for this.
ReplyDeleteI have used Pixabay for a few years now with no problem. I download the images to my computer as requested, and acknowledge the contributor and the site. I've used them on my blog and other places.
ReplyDeleteI have only recently started using Pixabay after a mention in an earlier query on WAGB. I always give a citation out of courtesy, and to date have not encountered problems.
ReplyDeleteThat could happen with any images, copyrighted or not, if you reference them directly. By coincidence, I was wanting to use an image from 1880, appearing originally in the Police Gazette, but can't find any information about copyright. Would that be out of the normal period over in the US?
ReplyDeleteYes the cutoff is 1923 in the U.S.
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