Why Online Image-Borrowing Is Good Policy

Seeing as how I grab lots of images for my posts, like the photo by my old employer TIME.com in this post, I figured it was fair to elaborate on my own beliefs on borrowing images across the web: everybody wins.

My photo-editor friend Maria, also formerly of TIME.com, said it best when she noted that as long as the website that’s borrowing the image links to the original website that produced the image, then she had no problem with anybody else using that intellectual property.

I heard that. Not only does this allow the blogger or whomever to get some free visual content onto their site, it creates an attractive link promo for users to head back to the image’s original site.

That’s assuming you follow the policy of linking to the image source. If you don’t, then you’re just a jag. I try to be very good about the non-jag policy of image use around here, though I probably have a few jag moments that I’ve missed now and then. (I just went back and linked up an Obama victory image when I noticed it wasn’t linked. Whoops.)

To summarize: image stealing = good when credit is given.