Should Wallpaper Use Be Free?

Posted on 9/3/2013 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (2)

Many Internet users seem to believe that it is OK to use any image they find online for wallpaper on their site. The next step is to grab a bunch of images they like and create a site that makes the images available to others for free wallpaper use. And, once they’ve gone to the trouble to create a site the site owners figure they might as well make a little money by selling a few ads.

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Comments

Larry Minden Posted Sep 3, 2013
This is an immense issue. Minden Pictures has sent take down notices to nearly 100 free wallpaper distributors giving away our images. You're lucky if they take down your images but you're living in a dream world if you think you are other than throwing your money away by hiring attorney's to file suit against sites with ownership in Peru or Indonesia let alone, Russia or China.

Yuri Kozlov Posted Sep 4, 2013
You address the right problem from the wrong angle. It's not about wallpapers. It's about rampant copyright infringement of images on Web. This phenomenon changes rules of stock photography. I can take any watermarked photo from Shutterstock, run google image search on it and get watermark-free image in seconds. The sheer scale of copyright infringement makes it impossible to fight and calls for new concepts and business models. That would be interesting subject for an article.

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