At R.O. Why! Marketing, one of the things we do for clients as part of our blogging for business solution is to review their blog posts before they go live.  It's all part of an effort to make sure that as an organization, the client sends a consistent and clear brand message to the market.  In most cases we catch a couple of spelling errors or we recommend rewording something so the brand development police won't worry about competing messages.  Not a big deal and pretty easy to deal with.

Today, in reviewing a post that included an image, I saw something fuzzy in the image and when I blew it up larger, it was a copyright watermark.  Yes, the client had used Google Image Search to find a picture to help illustrate the point in the blog post.  Harmless enough, but they didn't realize that it was a copyrighted image.  OOPS!

We quickly removed the blog post, notified the client, and the image was replaced with another royalty free photo.  Luckily our client wasn't approached by the photo's owner, but this was a good lesson for them to learn.

Don't assume that images you find on Google are free for you to use as you wish.  Google doesn't own these images, but simply stores a thumbnail in its cache.  When you click on one, Google splits the screen to show you the thumbnail and the page that the full size version appears on.  The site that the image appears on is (or should be!) the rightful owner with license to use the image.

The better route would be to seek out royalty free image sites, or better yet, purchase credits to a stock photo site like iStock and purchase inexpensive web resolution images as you need them.

Be careful.  Just because it's freely accessible, doesn't mean it's free!