Can I use this image in my photo quiz?

Answer: Purchasing an image off a clipart site

The first and most important rule about images in photo quizzes is that for FunTrivia purposes, you can use only three types of images:

- Images in which you own all rights. Furthermore, while there are some corner cases where you can own complete and exclusive rights to a work you did not create yourself, on FunTrivia this means you yourself (not your wife, not your kids and not your friend - YOU) have shot that photo.
- Images that are available under an eligible Creative Commons license. Currently, only one such license - the Attribution license - is eligible.
- Images that are in the public domain. This means no one holds any copyrights on them and everyone can freely use them. We will later take a look at how an image can get into the public domain.

Buying an image off a stock photo site is neither of these three, so even though you may think that once you bought the image, you own it (or at least all rights to use it), this is not true. In particular, one thing you cannot do is to sub-assign rights you licensed, but by writing a photo quiz, you would have to do exactly that - FunTrivia would need the rights to publish the photo and you can't give us that right even if you yourself do have the right to publish it.

Simple Rule to remember: If the image is neither of the three things listed in the photo quiz template, you can't use it, regardless how much someone may tell you you have permission.

Answer: Attribution only

The "attribution" clause is mandatory in all Creative Commons licenses. It requires the user of a Creative Commons work to credit the original author.

The "noncommercial" clause forbids anyone from using the image for commercial profit. While you wouldn't commercially use it by volunteering to write a quiz, FunTrivia is a commercial site and every time a quiz is played, a small amount of money is made (either through ads or as part of the members subscription fee).

The "no derivative works" clause means that you or anyone else cannot use the image as basis for a significantly different work, combining it or part of it with any other creative material. By writing a quiz based on the image, you are creating something new - a derivative work.

The "share alike" clause is not as strong as the previous one but still inadmissible. It allows you to create a derivative work but then requires that work to be under the same license - anyone could thus legally copy such a quiz to another website, change it around and generally use it for anything they want, even if you (or FunTrivia) would not agree with that use.

So, if it is anything else than just "Attribution", you can't use it. This may sound restrictive, but isn't - Flickr alone has over 30 million images under this one license.

Don't get confused by a few other things that may be in the license name: You may see "Generic", "Unported" or a version number. They reflect specific versions and updates of the license - any of them is fine with us.

Simple Rule to remember: A Creative Commons image can be used if and exactly if the license is "Creative Commons Attribution", in any version. Other Creative Commons licenses don't work.

Answer: You can pick either license, but not combine them.

Some image authors offer their content under more than one license, the most common combination being the GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike because these two licenses are very similar. In each such case, you can pick the license you want to use but every time you want to use the image, you must meet all terms of one of the licenses. (You could of course pick one license for using the photo in a quiz and a second one for using it on Wikipedia).

What you can't do, however, is pick some terms from license A and some others from license B to build your own third set. A good example for this is the uncommon but existing double Creative Commons license, one being Attribution-Noncommercial and the other Attribution-ShareAlike. The result is that, if you want to use it in a commercial work, you must make that work available under the Creative Commons license, but if your work is hobby work without a commercial interest, you are free to put whatever license you wish on the final product. (No combination of two Creative Commons licenses however creates a picture usable for a FunTrivia photo quiz, so don't worry about analyzing those for this purpose. Just stick with Attribution.)

Simple Rule to remember: If you see a combination of a Creative Commons License and some other license, ignore the other one and just check if the Creative Commons one is Attribution only. If it is, you can use the image.

Answer: The way he/she asks for if any, otherwise best effort

The Creative Commons Attribution license leaves the form of the attribution to be given to the author. If using such an image, you should always check the author information page of the website you have taken it from or, in the case of a photo sharing service like Flickr, the user's profile. He or she might have put a request for a specific form of credit there and if that exists, you need to do it the way the author asks for. If you can't find this information, you can go by your best effort - on Flickr this would best the user name and a weblink back to the photo or that user's profile information. If a real name is given and the author doesn't explicitly ask for you not to pass it on, you should always put it in your image credit. Addresses including e-mail addresses should only be posted if explicitly requested to protect people from unwanted mass mailings and identity theft.

Note that FunTrivia rules always require you to provide a link to the page you took the image from so that editors can verify the image license.

Simple rule to remember: Look at the contact page or profile of the author to see how they want to be credited. If no instructions are given, use first and last name or the author's user ID on the site you took the image from.

Answer: A Wikimedia project such as Wikipedia

Putting content into the public domain is a permanent declaration that the original creator and copyright owner forfeits that copyright. United States government agencies, by law, have to do this for all material they create, because their work has been funded with public money. This means that NASA, for example, is an excellent source of FunTrivia images. (Note that some logos and designs, including currency and seals, may still be protected).

Copyrights, while being long-lasting, also do expire. There are several protection periods which vary by author and jurisdiction, but by international agreement, the longest such period is applied to natural persons - their copyrights extend for up to 75 years beyond their death.

A third source for public domain content is content expressly released into the public domain by its author. The author declares to give up his or her copyright and with that act, the work is in the public domain. Note however that the terms must exactly use this wording. If someone merely states "all images on this website may freely be downloaded and used for any purpose", this is a revokable declaration and does not put the images into the public domain. If you see something like "I void my copyright and release these images into the public domain", it's safely in the public domain and cannot later be revoked, even if the author changes his or her mind.

One last note here: You must apply these rules to the photo AND to the subject of the image. A recent photo of a 16th century painting is a copyrighted work, even if the painting itself is not!

Simple Rule to remember: A work is in the public domain only if the author is dead for more than 75 years or has explicitly stated that it is in the public domain. US government agencies are required to state that by law, so their images are good to use.

Answer: The cat

Beyond licenses, there are three major restrictions to photo content - model rights, copyright/trademark status of the subject matter and limitations to photography on private property.

Model rights apply every time when you have a recognizable person in your image who is not purely incidental to the photo (the visitors in my Disneyland image are incidental - they are not the subject of the photo in but just happened to be in the frame). You need to obtain a special permission, called a model release, from anyone shown in your photos. FunTrivia will ONLY accept photos with recognizable people if you made them yourself and by submitting them, you confirm that you have obtained the appropriate model release OR if any copyrights and model rights have certainly expired - the person depicted must have been dead for at least 75 years.

The computer screen is an example of subject copyrights - The screen itself displays copyrighted material, in this case a website you all know quite well. You cannot use a photograph to get around this copyright - if your image subject is something that is subject to copyright, you would need permission of the copyright owner. In this case, the camera screenshot is no different than a direct screen capture - I am reproducing the site's content. (This will also apply to prominently used trademarked logos).

In this context, one rare case deserves mention - buildings are copyrighted by their respective architects and by default this also applies to photographing or drawing the building, although many countries have shortened or eliminated this protection. Belgium, for example, is one of the countries which does enforce copyrights on architecture photos and the most prominent case is the Atomium - you cannot publish an image of it without violating copyrights. Of course the 75-year limit still applies, so anything built prior to 1900 is likely to be fair game for any photo quiz as long as you take the picture from a public place.

Finally, the scene at Disneyland is from my "A Perfect Disney Day" series - here I had no problems because Disney has very lenient photo rules. However I planned to do the same for Universal Studios and their rules were quite restrictive and I could not use any of the photos I took without their written permission, so the quiz about that park unfortunately remained unwritten. Whenever you take photographs on a private property, you must make sure the owner of that property actually allows you to take photos and use them commercially if you want to include them in a FunTrivia photo quiz.

As a side note, unlike with copyrights and trademarks, the private property and model release rules cannot get FunTrivia into trouble - but you could open yourself up to some costly litigation, so be careful.

Simple Rule to remember: If your image shows an identifiable person or was taken while you were on private property, you need permission by the property owner or depicted person to use it on FunTrivia.

Answer: You could be banned from using the Internet

Any copyright violation, regardless how small, will be treated seriously by FunTrivia. If we find you to violate image copyrights, you can almost be sure that you will at least be suspended from writing further photo quizzes and you might also face other author restrictions, as if you had plagiarized some text. In addition, we will of course be forced to take your quiz offline until it has been repaired, replacing the image(s) in question with new material not infringing any copyrights.

Finally, you could also be liable for damages which, depending on the image owner and its status, may be quite significant. A private photo without recognizable persons on it might not cost you much, but a prominent news image might set you back several thousand dollars.

Your internet connection, for the time being, however is safe. Just don't be too sure about it in the long run - some countries are in the process of enacting "three strikes" laws or already have them, forcing an Internet Service Provider to cut a person's access after they have three times been convicted of a copyright violation. Of course, any person losing their connection that way will likely face serious problems finding a new provider.

Simple Rule to remember: Stick to our rules - we have them for a reason.

Answer: Yes, provided you get FunTrivia's permission first

The FunTrivia Terms of Service state that whenever you submit some content to the site, you grant FunTrivia a perpetual and exclusive license to that content. You maintain the copyright, but this does not actually help you in this case. The license is exclusive which means that no one else, not even you, can make use of the image. However we will not usually deny such a request unless you want to use the content on a directly competing product, so all it takes is a site feedback message and you'll be able to put your prize husky right on the front page, without worry that, later on, someone will accuse either your quiz or your kennel webpage of being plagiarized.

Note that this does not apply to public domain or Creative Commons images (no one can assign an exclusive license to one of those), so here's a second way if you don't want to later have to ask for permission to use your own photo: If you share the image under CC-BY (the shorthand name for the Creative Commons attribution license) before uploading it to FunTrivia and use it as such, crediting yourself in the quiz, you can use your doggie's photo for any purpose without needing to ask anyone - but so can anyone else!

Simple Rule to remember: If you submit something to FunTrivia and later want to use it elsewhere, you must notify us and get permission.

Answer: You can do all of them

All three licenses permitted for photo quiz content on FunTrivia content also allow you to create derivative works - building your own work of art based while using the original. What I did here, however, does not even go that far. A derivative work requires that I invested some significant creative energy myself and none of these changes meet that standard. Making these small corrections is thus permitted, still you should note them in your image credit. (e.g. "Photo by Terry Ford, taken from http://www.funtrivia.com/nicepicture.jpg, cropped and color-corrected")

Simple Rule to remember: You can modify eligible images in any way you want before you use them on FunTrivia, but when you do, note in your image credit what you have done.

Answer: It is my own photo

The image to the left is my own work - I planned out this collage and assembled it myself. However, it is what is called a derivative work: I have used significant parts of other people's creations in my piece, so I need to make sure I do follow their licenses as well. In this case, this means I do click the "It is my own" button, but then, still must give proper credit including the required web URL for both the public domain image and the Creative Commons image used as sources. You can look at the correct, quite lengthy, attribution in the image credits for this quiz.

Simple Rule to remember: If you create something new out of eligible content, it is your work, but you still need to credit any source material used according to its respective license.