About Bobbie Peachey Expertise My goal is to help you quickly find the topic specific clip art you need and are searching for-- everything from alphabets, people and sports, etc. to Web basics of menu buttons, banners, image maps, words and sayings.
Experience Over fours years searching the Web and locating clip art to create a resource of individual topic specific indexes and categories.
Expert: Bobbie Peachey Date: 5/30/2002 Subject: "free" backgrounds and pictures for Website
Question Hi Bobbie,
Hope your doing fine! I'm developing a horse-care (products) Website. I found several (and I'm still looking) sites that have pictures of horses and sites with (what looks like wooden) backgrounds that I want to use on my site. My question is--are these "public domain"? Can I use these on my site without permission by anyone? (I'm more interested about the horse pictures. With the backgrounds, I can give a free link, if the owner wants. But the horse pictures, I found randomly, while searching farms and ranches, etc.)
Thank you,
Larry
Answer Hello Larry,
Since you did not send any of the Web site addresses so that I could look at the images or backgrounds to determine if the images are available for you to use, I cannot answer your question.
However........ No, the images or backgrounds are probably NOT in the public domain.
REAL Public Domain clip art and photos are very rare and hard to find. Public domain clip art is normally black and white, very large images, and would need lots of work with an image editor to resize, clean up, and color so that they could be used on Web pages.
It sounds as though you have surfed to individual Web sites that are information sites and not sites where the Web master or Web artist has created clip art, photos, or backgrounds for you and others to use.
You could go to these sites again and, if the images are for your use, there will be a terms of usage statement somewhere on the page that the images or backgrounds are on, telling you how you may use the images or backgrounds or photos.
If there is no terms of usage, then assume that you cannot use the backgrounds or images. If you want to pursue usage of the backgrounds and images, you could locate the Web masters, email him/her and let him/her know where, how, and why you want to use the images and ask his/her permission to do so.
You might want to read a bit about copyrighted images, public domain, and "free" clip art.
