'Copyright license choice' by opensource.com Flickr CC (BY-SA 2.0) ​Recently I uploaded the short story Sweet Bombe Alaska, one of this year’s RWA Little Gems, to my website as well as Wattpad. For those of you who use Wattpad, you’ll know that readers in this online community judge a book by its cover much the same as any other reader does. So, off I went to the interwebs to find myself a suitable cover.
 
I found this striking image by VaMedia. It had just the right amount of intrigue I was after for my YA story. I then fired off a few tweets to let the cyber world know my little tale of high school woe was out there.
 
Which resulted in this exchange with the creator of the photograph:  ​Why am I telling you this, you ask?  Because had I not been a careful copyright license ninja and specifically sought out a Creative Commons image made available for commercial use, I may well have ended up with a copyright breach lawsuit. That’s right, just because an image is available on the internet does not mean it’s ‘free’ for people to use. Be very careful with your ‘right click & save’ manoeuvre; it could result in more than just a case of RSI.
 
Don’t believe me? Ask romance author, Roni Loren, or the bloggers over at the Content Factory, who ended up in deep copyright waters a few years ago, because they used copyrighted images on their blogs. If you can’t find a license for a work, assume it is fully copyrighted and DO NOT use it unless you seek permission directly from the creator. ​So what is my recourse, you ask?  You can pay a stock photo subscription service such www.shutterstock.com or use Creative Commons and public domain images.
 
Luckily, it’s very easy to find Creative Commons and public domain images for your website or blog. Simply go to https://search.creativecommons.org/ and search sites such as Flickr, Pixabay and Google for images under CC licenses. Flickr has a vast repository of Creative Commons images and is my first port of call for blog post pictures.
 
Once you’ve found an image you like, CHECK and DOUBLE CHECK ITS LICENSE! There are 6 different Creative Commons licenses, as well as an ‘all rights granted’ public domain license. Use images ONLY according to their license: About the licenses - Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) As writers we should be doubly careful to respect the licensing of other people’s creative works. After all, we want others to respect the copyright of our creative works.
So I urge you - become a copyright license ninja!

Have any of you inadvertently breached image copyright at some point in your blogging career? I'd love to hear about your experiences.