Trudy, I recommend Zemanta.com as a way of getting photos for your blog zemanta lives in your browser, and when you starting writing a blog article, it suggests copyright free photos, or you can put in specific keywords for it to search. They use Creative Commons photos, so you do not have to find them.

Here is a good article on the use of cc: http://ow.ly/a7BQX

And from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

@Glen, I haven’t used the related articles links yet on my blogs. Do you find these useful?

@trudy Simply put, Creative Commons is “permission in advance” for certain pieces of content like photos, videos, or audio files. It allows you to use that content in your own publications, like say, a photo to go along with a blog post.

All you have to do to use it is provide attribution to the original creator, and maybe even link back to them. There are other rules and expectations of Creative Commons, but they vary from piece to piece. Check out http://www.creativecommons.org to find out more about those rules.

The short of it is, you cannot just use anyone’s photo, unless you either have their permission — which you have to ask for, wait for, and possibly pay for — or you get that permission in advance — which is what Creative Commons does. So, rather than just grabbing a photo you found on Google Image Search, you can do an advanced search and only search for Creative Commons images.

@trudy If you license your content as Creative Commons, or find content licensed as Creative Commons, it means that others can use it freely with attribution to its owner.  So if I had a photo under the Creative Commons license, I could say that anyone can use it as an image on their blog so long as they say the photo was by me and link back to my photo blog.  Usually any content that is creative commons licensed will have some specific details, such as whether you can modify it or use it commercially.

@kristi-hines @juleswebb @erikdeckers @anitacohen-williams @glengorham Just saying you all are awesome. Thanks for the thoughtful comments on something I had never heard of until yesterday.Wishing much success to each of you/

@trudy I give a Creative Commons license when I want people to share my content. For example, a free ebook that I want people to pass around. Technically, if it is just copyrighted, I control the distribution and no one else can distribute it, copy it, etc. So by offering a CC license, I keep my copyright but allow others to distribute my ebook for me!

It’s a great system imagined and run by legal minds. It’s great for the collaborative nature of social media and the internet. Give it a try.

@trudy You are welcome. Copyright law is really tricky stuff. Because I write for a living, I have invested a lot of time to understanding how to protect my work and how to engage with the works of others. Even with my serious but casual study (I haven’t enrolled in law school!), I know enough to know that it’s complicated. 

And attitudes about copyright are shifting. We are seeing new bills in Congress that fundamentally change the way we think about copyright. And then there is Mickey Mouse! About the time that his copyright was going to expire, suddenly the law changed so that Mickey wasn’t in the public domain. That makes sense, of course, but it required changing the law.