the ourlocality network

The line between copyright infringement and innocent online scrapbooking or hotlinking is hazy for most of us mortals without a legal background. At ourlocality we take care to avoid flagrant abuses and will counsel those of you that have received a snippy email from an aggrieved photographer. They will know that it ain’t worth it, i.e. borrowing other’s work without permission is not a good idea.

Always check whether you are free to use the image, or ask the maker/author. A way around this is to be original (if you have not time to take your images and your design skills are weak). A suitably cropped screenshot of a web page to include additional text as well as the image etc, rather than using the image alone, could be a way to overcome obvious objections. But the question is how do you do it?

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We find that most of our publishers struggle to keep their website properties up to date.  It is not that hard to string a few words together keep online presence fresh, but we understand that life is increasingly too short and there’s never enough time.  We already need extra time to update our facebook status, check so and so’s relationship status, catch up with the latest episode of whatever on iPlayer and so many other things that your free website is the last thing on your mind.  We understand. And lack of freshness is just fine and dandy, so long as your mission critical project timeline doesn’t rely on it and hey, your immense following on twitter isn’t really paying attention as they forgot what they were thinking 30 seconds ago. Phew!

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