by Tomm Swords

Created on: December 03, 2009

Can you really blame someone for stealing a royalty free image? After all, the keyword is in the phrase, and that word is free.

Can you imagine the joy felt within the newbie blogger, browsing the net looking for images to illustrate a point in a blog post. She has written a piece about the shopping habits of women and she needs images to illustrate and support her words. She stumbles upon a Google search which says something along the lines of Download Royalty Free Images.

She clicks on the link and it takes her to the appropriate website. The first thing she sees is the search engine on the website. She enters the search terms women shopping bags and within seconds she has a page full of quality images of women in various shopping poses, weighed down with pretty bags. These images are fantastic! It is clear that they have been well photographed and the models all look very attractive. Just the thing to bring that blog entry to life.

What's more, the images are just the right size to adorn a blog. Not much else to do except right click the mouse to bring up the menu and left click on save image as.... And she finds more of these websites offering what she now terms as free images, except she comes up against a stumbling block: when she right clicks the image to download it, a menu doesn't come up. She can't download the image she wants. The site's owner does not want their image saved. No problem, there is a workaround and she can carry on ensuring her blog is illustrated for free.

What our blogger doesn't know is that royalty free does not mean the image is free. It means there are no royalties to pay on the image. These so called royalty free images are generally found on microstock photography sites. The general arrangement here is that rather than a user pay royalties on an image, the user pays for a licence to use the image in a particular and limited way. Perhaps the image is used limited amount of times, before a new licence is required (the extended licence).

Microstock photography websites are areas online where photographers can display their images and, via the site, sell a licence for others to use their images. These images not only range in subject, but in size as well and can be used in a wide variety of circumstances from the teeniest thumbnail, to a street advertisement hoarding.

Should someone wish to use an image, the hosting website is paid by the user for the appropriate licence and the photographer, then gets a cut or you could look

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