Is an image search website legal?

There's already a fair few 'stock search-engines' that aggregates images from free stock websites and creative commons submissions in flickr etc.

Under that assumption, I'd guess they are legal. Always worth further investigation though

Conzz

It depends what you mean?

Obviously something like Google images IS legal otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.

So long as you don't store the actual images and only act as a search engine for those images.

I think there is nothing illegal in this because the only thing it would be - is a search engine, right? You would not host the images, or use them in any way.

So, it should not be illegal in any way to create a new search engine, why would it be?

It's funny the way Google works. You can search for images on websites that are crawled by that search engine. And if you don't want you stuff to appear on it you got to mark it private and then you'll likely not have any visibility.

Back to the topic at hand:
It is NOT illegal as long as you have the websites listed with the proper accreditation.
Don't put download or free download text anywhere just make it as clean as possible.
Encourage users to also upload images so it's all in your network and database.

I don't think there are clearly defined laws to an image search website since it's such a rare and unique situation, but I've seen some pretty prominent sites that link to Flickr images without any issues. I'd say that as long as you provide a legitimate source to the respective images, and you don't claim ownership over the images that appear on your website, you should have your bases covered.

The fact that a big corporation is doing something does not make it automatically legal. They do not make laws. But, they certainly can afford to operate in a grey zone. Google has its own lawyers on payroll, and even if they loose a case, a couple of millions to pay for damages is candy money for them. If it's candy money for you too, go ahead. Otherwise I wouldn't touch the images of big stock image companies.

Once again someone starts a thread asking for "legal advice". And, as with the thousands of other threads like this one, the answer is always the same.

The forum is not a resource for legal advice, and any "advice" you get here would be worthless if you needed to defend yourself in a court of law. All you are receiving is a bunch of conflicting opinions, which really doesn't help answer your question. Just because the majority of respondents "think" it's legal doesn't mean anything, and vice-versa.

If you want advice on setting up a squeeze page or an opinion on what the best WordPress plugin is you are in the right place. But I'd suggest that if you truly want proper legal advice go see a lawyer.

Bill

I am not a lawyer, and others have wisely stated. A forum is not the right place to get legal advice.

That said a couple of points

1. Is any search engine legal? After all they are using copyrighted web content without permission. I believe there was a US case which ruled if they respected robots.txt then they had implicit permission to index public web content.

2. What about images and thumbnails etc. Again there has been a US case about them where it was okay, even without permission, under certain circumstances, iirc when used purely to locate info.

Of course I may have some details wrong, but both cases are in Wikipedia, and there are probably a million details a real lawyer could discuss with you, and maybe other issues to.

And one final point, there seems to be a misconception that if you stay totally legal, then you will not be sued. Wrong. You can not stop people suing you even for meritless reasons, except by not annoying them enough to make them want to sue you. The benefit of staying legal is not that you cannot be sued, the benefit is that you should win if you are sued and fight it in court.

You would definitely need to see a copyright lawyer with experience in international cases and digital content.

Let's assume that as some have suggested it is legal in the US. Is it still legal if you are serving up a picture from a site that isn't US based, and doesn't believe you have the right to do so? Their content is protected by their own independent legal framework.

US law cannot offer you another country's copyrighted content, nor do the cases mentioned earlier even attempt to.

Google gets fined quite regularly in Europe, and if it was any other company they would certainly have been closed down, or sued out of existence.

This is an issue of international copyright laws, and before you mess with that or make judgement calls you need to consult a specialist lawyer.

It is not illegal as long as the link will point back to the owner or image host.

Hopefully it's legal for you to do such a thing. If you can't find the definitive answer that you're looking for... start over in another niche.

They are legal provided you attribute the image source to the owner as well as supply the appropriate copyright and license information of each.