Dangers of Royalty Free Images and Videos without Author Information

On the Internet, you can sometimes find royalty free images that you can legally use in your own commercial projects without having to pay the image's author licensing fees or royalties. These can be free stock photos, free clipart, even free video footage. Licenses vary from Creative Commons (CC) to works in Public Domain (PD). Unfortunately, in some cases these "free" images aren't actually free, they're just stolen.

There are platforms focused on sharing licensed images and videos with the Internet. See [Comparison of Websites for Free Images] for a list. On these platforms, sometimes users who do not own the copyright of a work, and also do not understand how copyright or licensing works, will upload works that they found on the Internet that they believe are free because they could download it for free.

Some egregious cases:

• Needpix marks all works as "public domain" even when they are not. There is a huge difference between public domain (or CC Zero) and other licenses. In particular, most CC licenses require attribution, i.e. explicitly disclaiming who is the author of the work. If you use a CC BY work without attributing the author, you are violating the license, and that's no different from stealing a random copyrighted work from the Internet.
• Goodfon is a free wallpaper-sharing website that tells Google everything uploaded is copyleft even though much of it are copyrighted images that technically you wouldn't even be allowed to redistribute without permission of the author.

The problem becomes worse when one platform starts accepting works from another free platform indiscriminately. After all, if all works in one platform are free, you can safely copy all of them to your free platform without issue, right?

This happens for example in OpenClipart.org, which sometimes accepts works from other royalty free platforms without even precisely disclaiming the source of the work, e.g. the description will just say "I found it on example.com."

Precautions You Can Take

Personally, I think a good measurement of whether something is ACTUALLY free or not is whether it includes author information.

Works don't just appear out of thin air. Someone has to create it. Without a person's or organization's name, I'll just assume it's stolen.

Even though you aren't required to give attribution to works in public domain, specially works from authors from centuries ago, there is no reason not to do it. Having died doesn't make a person disappear, as their spirit survives through their works. I think that's really beautiful. I don't see a reason to take a painting from the 17th century and think of it as a "just a free classic painting I found on the Internet" rather than "someone's work deserving of respect."

If you're publishing your own works for free, please choose a platform that allows you to say who you are. Many free images and video platforms lack any sort of author information on the work's pages, which I think is ridiculous. It's like they're just scraping the Internet for free images to put ads on it, without doing even the bare minimum of work. Observe, for example, that Flickr and Ipernity allows people to comment on your photos, and for you to have a profile page with information about yourself.

You don't need a platform that supports creative commons metadata to license your works as Creative Commons, as licensing is about law, not about code.

For example, Doing it for the Exposure [tumblr.com/doingitfortheexposure] is a photographer's blog on Tumblr that has Creative Commons-licensed images. How do I know this? Because the blog's bio reads "Creative Commons photography by Xer S. Rowan," and there is a pinned post that says "I'm a disabled hobby photographer sharing my works freely with the world." This is a lot more information about the author than you'll find in many platforms that distribute free stock images, which is really, really sad, to be honest.

Make sure to look for the motivation someone would have to make something available for free on the Internet. In some cases, they're doing it because they think it will help them gain exposure, as it makes easier to share and attribute their works. I'm not really sure if this actually works, but at least it's a motivation.

I can imagine that some platforms are taking royalty free works and redistributing them to place ads on them and monetize the works. This is allowed. For example, Wikipedia doesn't have ads, but you can find many Wikipedia clones that do have ads around the Internet. Kiddle maintains a kid-friendly Wikipedia copy that does have ads, for example. While this may sound dishonest, just taking someone's work and putting ads on it because you legally can, personally I think that providing redundancy is providing value. If nobody donates to Wikipedia, it shuts down, and then only the clones with ads will be available. While that would be unlikely and devastating, the same is more likely to happen with small websites and blogs that distribute royalty free images. Having those free images still available somewhere is a benefit to people. It's just unfortunate they don't include author information so often.

For example, I came across a Youtube channel that claims to provide royalty free videos, but not only is there no authorship information, the long descriptions in the video have zero information about the video itself and seem to be all based on a template. I can't fathom why such channel exists. This could be someone who is genuinely posting royalty free videos for some reason, but it just doesn't really feel genuine. I tried asking them who the author of a video is and I'm waiting for a reply.

Update: the channel has answered, saying the videos are authored by Sumit Ranaware [sumalno.wordpress.com]. This makes sense, considering the use of the initials "SR" in the channel's name and profile picture. However, this doesn't actually prove that author created this channel or consented to having their work shared there. Which means the next thing to do is search on Google for the author's name and see if they link to this channel anywhere. If they do, that means they acknowledge its existence and it's not something created behind their backs. In this case, I haven't been able to find any post or profile information that indicated the author knew about the channel. So I contacted the author on Instagram and asked if it was really their channel. He confirmed. So, against all odds, despite how suspicious it looks, it's actually a legitimate channel. Feel free to check it out [youtube.com/@FreeStockFootage-SR].

If you want to use a work and you aren't really sure whether or not it's actually free, just ask. Contact the uploader. Ask them: "hey, I want to use your work for free in my work that makes money, and I won't give you a cent, is that okay with you?" If you don't have the courage to ask whether it's okay to do what you're about to do, you aren't doing something that you should be doing in first place. Don't use the author's work behind their back. That's unethical. Work on things that you're proud of so that you can boldly ask for permission with dignity.