Copyright: photos, fonts, texts and licenses

Copyright arises for an author when a work is created, with no registration. Other people’s work is used under a license or in cases the law names outright.

Found does not mean yours

A site is made of other people’s materials almost more than of yours: photographs, fonts, icons, sometimes quotations, sometimes scraps of code. Each belongs to someone. Not knowing doesn’t release you from responsibility, and the way to check is simple: for each material you must have written down the author, the source, the license and a link. This is called a register, and you’ll write one for your site.

A caveat that, as in the earlier lessons, is obligatory: this lesson is a guide, dated 30 October 2026, and it doesn’t replace a lawyer. The rules below are from US federal law (Title 17 of the United States Code, the Copyright Act), with notes on the United Kingdom (the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, “CDPA”) and the European Union. Read the texts of licenses on the licenses’ own sites.

How copyright works

• It arises by itself. The author gets the right the moment the work is created: an article, a photograph, a drawing, a font as a work, a program. In the US, copyright protects original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression (17 U.S.C. § 102). No registration is needed to own the copyright, and the © notice is optional: it’s a reminder, and it helps against a defense of “innocent infringement.” The UK works the same way.
• Registration matters in the US for enforcement. For a US work, the owner generally can’t sue for infringement until the work is registered (§ 411(a)), and statutory damages and attorney’s fees are generally unavailable for infringement that began before registration (§ 412), with a three-month grace period after publication. So registration is a tool for owners, not a condition of owning.
• Form is protected, not the idea. Ideas, methods and facts aren’t protected (§ 102(b)), but the way you express them (your text, your photograph) is. So “saying the same thing in your own words” is fine, and “taking someone else’s text and swapping words” is not. Works of the US federal government aren’t protected by copyright (§ 105), which is why many NASA images and government reports are free to use.
• A bundle of rights. The owner has the exclusive rights to reproduce the work, make derivative works, distribute it and display it publicly (§ 106), which includes publishing it on the internet. Ownership can belong to the author or be transferred. In the UK and EU the author also keeps moral rights, such as being named and objecting to derogatory treatment; the UK asks that the right to be identified be asserted (CDPA section 78). US law gives only narrow moral rights to visual artists (§ 106A).
• How long. For works created since 1978 the US term is the author’s life plus 70 years (§ 302(a)); for anonymous works and works made for hire it’s 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever ends first (§ 302(c)). The UK term is also life plus 70 years. Afterwards the work is in the public domain.
• Using another’s work needs a license, or one of the cases the law names, such as quotation and fair use.
• What it can cost. An infringer can be made to pay the owner’s actual losses and profits, or, if the owner chose, statutory damages of $750 to $30,000 per work, up to $150,000 per work if the infringement was willful (§ 504(c)); the court may also award attorney’s fees. These are lawsuits, not just complaints. For comparison, in Russia the compensation under Article 1301 of the Civil Code runs from 10,000 to 5,000,000 rubles, by the court’s decision.

Check yourself: is registration needed for a photographer to hold the copyright in a picture?

No. The right arises when the work is created, and neither the © sign nor registration creates it. In the US, registration matters for suing and for statutory damages.

Licenses: how to get the right

A license is the author’s permission for particular uses. An exclusive license is only for you; a non-exclusive one is for you and others. In the US a transfer of ownership (and an exclusive license counts as one) must be in a signed writing (§ 204(a)); a non-exclusive license can be informal, but you should have it in writing to be able to prove it. For mass use, open licenses were invented: the author allows everyone, in advance, to use the work on published terms.

The commonest open licenses for a site:

• Creative Commons. A set of conditions in the form of letters. BY: credit the author. SA: derivative works under the same license (this textbook is licensed that way, CC BY-SA 4.0). NC: non-commercial use only. ND: no changes. CC0: the author has given up their rights. For a site that sells services, NC material is no good: your use is commercial even if the picture itself is free. A credit follows a formula of four parts: title, author, source, license (with a link).
• Photo libraries with their own licenses. For example Unsplash and Pexels: under their licenses photos can be used for free, commercially too, with no required credit (though it’s kind to give one), but you may not sell a photo as it is. The Pexels license also asks you not to show identifiable people in a bad light, not to imply their endorsement, and not to use a photo as part of a trademark. Neither license lifts the rights of the people and trademarks shown in a picture.
• SIL OFL (an open font license, the one most Google Fonts use; you saw how to host such a font yourself in the lesson on typography) and MIT and Apache 2.0 (for libraries and icons): free use, with one condition: keep the text of the license and the notice about the authors.
• Paid photo libraries and fonts. The license sets where and how many times you may use the item: one license for the web, another for print, and a font often has a separate web license (sometimes by number of page views).

And two rules that deserve a paragraph of their own. Quoting without permission can be lawful. In the US the doctrine of fair use (§ 107) weighs four factors: the purpose and character of the use (including whether it’s commercial), the nature of the work, how much was used, and the effect on the market for the work. Purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research are the typical ones. It’s decided case by case, so it’s a defense and not a permit. In the UK the narrower fair dealing applies: a quotation is allowed if the work has been made available to the public, the use is fair dealing, it’s no longer than the purpose requires and it has sufficient acknowledgement (CDPA section 30(1ZA)). A quotation put in “for decoration” doesn’t qualify. And rewritten text of someone else’s is still a derivative work: the infringement remains, and such a duplicate also hurts the site in search.

Open the diagram and decide for eleven materials whether you may use them.

The site sells services, so its use is commercial. For each material choose an answer, then press “Check.” A teaching reading as of 30 October 2026; the real answer is the license on the particular file.

1. A photo from a search engine’s image results, with no author or license stated

   YesYes, with conditionsNo

2. A photo from Unsplash

   YesYes, with conditionsNo

3. A photo from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0

   YesYes, with conditionsNo

4. A photo under CC BY-NC (non-commercial use only)

   YesYes, with conditionsNo

5. A font from Google Fonts (SIL OFL license)

   YesYes, with conditionsNo

6. A paid font downloaded from a “free” pack on a doubtful site

   YesYes, with conditionsNo

7. An icon set under the MIT license

   YesYes, with conditionsNo

8. A two-sentence quotation from an article, with the author’s name and a link to the source, in a discussion of your topic

   YesYes, with conditionsNo

9. Text for a service, copied from a competitor with a few words changed

   YesYes, with conditionsNo

10. A photograph of an employee or client on the “About” page

    YesYes, with conditionsNo

11. A picture made by an AI tool

    YesYes, with conditionsNo

Check

Text alternative: eleven materials for a commercial site and the right answers. No: a photo without a clear license, a CC BY-NC photo, a font from a pirated pack, a rewritten competitor text. Yes: an Unsplash photo. Yes with conditions: a CC BY-SA photo (author, license, link), an OFL font (license with the file, better hosted by you), MIT icons (keep the license), a quotation under fair use or fair dealing, a photo of a person (written consent), an AI picture (service terms, uncertain rights).

Check yourself: why does a photo under CC BY-NC not suit a lawyer’s or an expert’s site?

The site offers paid services, so using the material is commercial (although the picture itself is free). NC allows only non-commercial use.

People, documents, commissioned work

• A photo of a person. The copyright in a photograph belongs to the photographer, not the person pictured. Taking a photo of someone in public is generally lawful in the US, but using a person’s name or likeness for advertising or to promote a business needs their permission under state right-of-publicity laws (California’s Civil Code § 3344, for example). A signed model release is the safe way. In the UK there’s no general image right, but an identifiable face is personal data (see the lesson on personal data law), and in the EU several countries protect personal image strongly. For the people in your brief, record both the consent and the period of publication.
• Scans of documents (diplomas, licenses, memberships). The official documents themselves are generally not creative works, but the personal data on them must be protected: cover the numbers and details you don’t need as proof.
• Commissioned work. Was the logo or the photographs for the site made by a designer, a photographer, an agency? The rule is the opposite of what people expect: the creator is the first owner, and a client gets rights only by a signed written agreement (§ 204(a)). Two exceptions matter. A work made for hire belongs to the employer (§ 101, § 201(b)), and that covers work by an employee within the scope of employment. A freelancer’s work is a work made for hire only if it falls in one of nine listed categories (for example a contribution to a collective work, a translation or a compilation) and both parties sign a writing saying so. A logo or website photo from a freelancer generally isn’t on that list, so the safe route is a written assignment or a written license. In the UK, an employer owns an employee’s work (CDPA section 11(2)), and a commissioned freelancer owns it unless they assign it in writing. Without a written agreement, a paid-for result can stay with the author.
• AI tools. US copyright law requires human authorship. In its report of 29 January 2025 on the copyrightability of AI outputs, the US Copyright Office took the view that output generated purely from prompts isn’t protected, while a human’s own creative contributions (selecting, arranging, modifying) can be. The picture may also resemble other people’s works, and the service’s terms decide whether you may use it commercially. Read the terms, don’t pass an image off as a photo of a real person or place, and leave the question of rights to a lawyer.
• Code and libraries. A library’s license is in its LICENSE file. Permissive licenses (MIT, Apache) ask you to keep the notice; some (GPL) have requirements for distributing code. This textbook opens its code under Apache-2.0 and its texts under CC BY-SA 4.0.
• If someone sends you a takedown notice. In the US, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) gives hosting services a safe harbor if they remove material promptly on a valid notice. If your host forwards you such a notice about a picture, check the register: if you have the right, you can send a counter-notice (§ 512(g)); if not, remove the picture. Knowingly sending a false notice or counter-notice carries liability (§ 512(f)).

The license of your own site

Others will want to take something from you too. Write down on what terms: “© name, 2026, all rights reserved,” if you allow nothing, or “texts under the CC BY 4.0 license,” if you allow use with credit to the author. It’s better to decide in advance and write it down: then well-meaning people will know what they may do, and you won’t have to answer queries.

Practice

You’re in the era of 2019: sites are built from ready-made blocks and other people’s materials. Run an audit: you get a register where some rows hold materials you have no right to. Replace them, write in sources, licenses and links, put the credit for CC BY materials in the footer, record the consents for photos of people and the license of your own materials.

The check reads the table: that no “unknown,” NC or empty cells remain, that the credit for CC BY is in place and that the rows hold the services, credentials and people from the brief. You’ll do the real check yourself: open the source page of each material and make sure the license on it is just what your register says.

What used to be different

In the 2000s pictures were taken from search, and authors seldom made claims: they didn’t know how to find where their work was used. Now they do: there’s reverse image search, and services that find copies automatically, and claims arrive with a demand for compensation. At the same time a culture of free licenses has grown: Creative Commons, photo libraries, open fonts. So the honest way has become simpler and cheaper than the dishonest one.