Why Can’t I Use Google Photos On My Therapist Site? – Copyright and You
You could already be a thief.
That’s not a personal judgment; it’s an unfortunate fact – if you don’t know what you’re doing when you post things on your private practice website, it’s way too easy to find yourself on the wrong side of the law for what feels like the harmless push of a button.
Much of the time, the Internet can seem like a big, open playground without any rules. Fortunately there are quite a few laws that help to govern the “playground,” keeping dangerous behavior in check and penalizing even petty criminals, like intellectual property thieves – intentional ones or not.
Let me ask you a few questions. Have you ever…
– Gone to Google’s image search to find photos for your private practice blog?
– “Borrowed” a paragraph from another therapist’s About Me page you really like?
– Used your favorite Internet meme to add personality to your site?
Yup, you’re probably an intellectual property thief.
But don’t worry! Keeping yourself and your business from falling on the wrong side of the law can be as simple as learning a few new facts and undoing a couple bad habits you may have online.
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What is “intellectual property theft”?
“Intellectual property” is a legal term that covers the ideas, inventions, plans, creative expressions, trade secrets, etc. of a person or company. To really boil it down, it’s the way that the government gives you property over your original ideas and creations and prevents other people from profiting off of them unfairly without your permission.
However, the reason that intellectual property theft gets so complicated and can be difficult to parse is because simply using, showing, or posting someone else’s image or other content doesn’t automatically make it illegal.
Nowadays, we’re used to information and content spreading over the Internet like wildfire. Anything we see online, we feel comfortable grabbing and posting on our personal social media accounts or in a group text to all our friends. And while ideally you would always seek the creator’s permission before posting any content that isn’t yours – as long as the social media account is for personal use only and you refer back to the original source whenever available, that’s generally fine.
All that changes, however, when we start talking about using the content you find online to help your business.
When you use someone else’s ideas or content on a website associated with a for-profit business like your practice, the law starts to bear its teeth more. Even if you’re just adding flavor to your homepage and not directly selling the image or a product that features it, it’s still arguably contributing to your business on the whole by being a part of your practice marketing.
A full explanation of the law can get pretty convoluted with many different types of intellectual property licenses, each with their own rules for usage and sharing, and the variable rules for the kinds of content you can post to your site. So we’ve filtered out the essential information you’ll need to know to protect your private practice website from legal shenanigans.
“Can I use this on my practice website without asking for permission?”
First of all, if you have the budget to spend on it one of the easiest ways to know for certain that you can use that piece of content on your business website is if you paid directly for the right to do so.
Purchasing your photos from paid sites like iStock, or hiring a freelance ghostwriter from a site like Upwork allow you to simply purchase the correct content license for your commercial business.
When looking for free content for your business site, on the other hand, things get a bit more delicate.
Look for the copyright symbols
One way to check if a piece of content is available for you to use freely for your business is to check what kind of copyright licenses they have. These are usually represented in shorthand with icons like this one.
Copyright Symbol
You probably recognize this as the classic copyright symbol. It is not a good idea to use content marked with this symbol alone without asking the creator’s permission.
However, these copyright icons are an entirely different story.
Creative Commons & Public Domain Symbols
When you spot the symbol on the left with two “C”s, it means that piece of content has a creative commons license which allows the free use of that content under certain restrictions. The good news is that as long as the symbol you see is the simple, two “C”s one that is featured above, you should feel free to use that content on your practice website without contacting the creator. To be safe, just remember to add an attribution to the creator somewhere on the page or in the corner of the image.
The copyright symbol on the right with the “C” crossed out is the sign that piece of content has a public domain license and is completely free for your use. Public domain content usually does not have an attributable author for whatever reason, so you can use them freely on your practice website without ever asking for permission.
Where to Get: Images
Unfortunately, you can’t just swing over to Google’s image search function and pick whichever photos pop up.
This is because Google’s normal image search doesn’t pay attention to commercial copyright licenses – it shows you all of the images it can find that satisfy your query. There are definitely some free-to-use images that will be mixed in with everything but unless you’re willing to individually investigate each image you like in order to find out about its copyright licensing, you’ll want to use Google’s Advanced Image Search.
Scroll to the bottom of that linked page to find the “usage rights” filter, and select “free to use, share or modify, even commercially.”
Image Credit: Google
Google is just one of many possible sources for your website images, however. There are many quality online databases where you can search for commercially free-to-use images in a more focused way.
For example…
When you’re looking for high quality photos, try Unsplash, VisualHunt, or Nappy.co.
When you’re looking for a wide selection of graphics, try Vecteezy.
Our Advice on Using Memes
Using your favorite memes on your practice website is always a bit of a risk unless you know the full story of that meme’s copyright (and those stories can get rather convoluted with some memes).
Since memes depend on copying or altering pre-existing material, you could be dealing with the copyright of both the creator of the meme, and the creator of the original content that is being referenced in the meme. Because of the social and shareable nature of memes, sometimes both creators couldn’t care less about enforcing their copyright – but other times they do, and it is never worth the risk when it comes to your business.
For example, you may be familiar with the popular Socially Awkward Penguin meme. What you may not know about it is that the company Getty Images handles the license for the penguin photo it features, and they are known for seeking out sites using the meme without the proper licensing and demanding licensing fees retroactively.
Our official recommendation is to keep your memes on social media when it comes to your practice website.
Where to Get: Writing
Our advice is pretty concise when it comes to using written content that is not yours. It comes down to three quick questions – 1) Did you pay for it to be written for your practice? 2) Is it public domain, such as famous historical quotations? 3) Is there an explicit note by the creator giving you permission to use the content commercially?
If the answer is “no” to all three of these, then don’t use the writing on your site.
As much of a chore as it can seem at the beginning, it’s best either to do the writing for your practice website on your own or to hire a freelance writer to do it for you (again, Upwork is a great place to start looking for freelancer help if you’re interested).
About the Growth Platform
If you’re part of the Brighter Vision family and subscribed to our Growth Platform auto-blogging service, you may wonder – how come that’s not intellectual property theft? After all, the Growth Platform allows you to post pre-written blog posts to your private practice blog to save an incredible amount of time, but it’s still content created by someone else.
The reason you can use the articles from our Growth Platform on your site even though you didn’t personally write them is basically because we say so.
We at Brighter Vision own the copyright to all of our professionally written Growth Platform blog articles, and therefore we have the right to sell licenses for those articles to whomever we want. So the reason it’s not copyright infringement when you use those articles on your practice site is because we’ve already agreed to sell them to you through your monthly Growth Platform subscription.
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Where to Get: Video
By now you’ve already learned some solid tips that will help you find strings-free imagery and text, but what if you’re looking for something a little more modern?
Video can be a powerful eye-catcher on your practice website, but with all these unexpected rules about intellectual property use, how can you be sure the video is free-to-use for your business? The first step would be to check for one of the copyright license symbols we talked about earlier, but in case that fails, I have great news for you.
All of YouTube is public domain.
That means that you can freely embed any video already on YouTube on your private practice website. So any video lectures, meditation exercises, or whatever you’d like to use from YouTube to embellish your website is free and legal for you to use.
If only all content sharing could be that easy!
Now you see that even with all the legalese floating around the issue, preventing yourself from accidentally committing intellectual property theft isn’t all that complicated.
It basically comes down to this: double-check the copyright license on the content, or go to a website you trust that only hosts free-to-use content for commercial use.
And just like that, you’re back on the right side of the law! Glad to have you back.
Still feeling anxious about managing all of your site content?
Reach out today to become a Brighter Vision customer and a professional website developer will build a beautiful, custom website for your practice. And since our developers only get our content from safe sources, you’ll never have to worry about copyright issues from content we put on your site.
Drop off your contact information using the form below, and our customer happiness team will get in touch with some more information.