How do you tell if a Google image is copyrighted or not?

Question

When you are on a Google search, and you find a bunch of images, most don't have copyright warnings (I don't just mean logos, I mean photos too).
I used some pictures like this, not knowing I was doing anything wrong, on an article I wrote, and was notified by the website hosting the article that some of the images were in violation of copyright, though I didn't know why.
I am not having any luck learning what exactly the problem was from the website in question, and when I went to the sources of the images, I found no notification of copyright.
Can someone please give me some guidelines (or preferably a link to a website that better explains some guidelines) on how to tell if an image found on a Google search is copyrighted or if it is in the public domain?

Answer 1

Copyright in the US (this may be different in Canada) is an "opt-out" sort of thing.



Basically, anything you create is automatically granted a copyright. You (as the rights-holder) have to proactively give up your copyright in order for something not to be copyrighted.



In other words, unless the rights-holder specifically says that they're releasing their work under some sort of license or to the public domain, it is copyrighted. In short: If it doesn't say it's not copyrighted, it is copyrighted.



Giving up your rights to something is actually not as easy as you might think. There are licenses (such as Apache, GPL, and Creative Commons) that are simple ways to voluntarily give up some of your rights while maintaining others. If you see anything about one of those around an image or other work, then you can click that icon to learn what you're allowed to do with that image.



The one exception is things that are in the public domain [1]. Copyrighted works generally enter the public domain between 50 and 70 years after the death of their creator. So unless something is from the 19th century, it's unlikely it's been released into the public domain unless the creator specifically says so.

Answer 2

You won't be able to tell, you will need to contact the site that was originally hosting it and ask them.

Answer 3

idk