Slightly OT: A new project and the first doubt

[Marc]

Bona nit!

After some months of chatting about the matter our group ha decided that we have enough material to begin working in our own website. We will have contents of the different roleplaying games we are running. Right now, some materials from Dark Conspiracy, Twilight:2000, Traveller TNE and GURPS are nearly ready to be posted. Although the contents of the website will be written in Catalan and in Spanish, some aids for GM belonging to roleplaying games that never has been translated to Spanish would be in English. Things like GM screens or Character Sheets, etc. For example, we are working right now in a fully automated character sheet for Twilight, to allow the players to generate their characters following the entire process of character generation according to the v2.2 set of rules and produce a printable "sheet" with all the needed parameters, included vehicle and weapon parameters.

Anyway, we are still working in the "big lines" and some doubts have emerged in the previous conversations. I'm sure some of you can help us. To begin with one of them: the pictures and drawings. We have one illustrator in our ranks, but the general agreement is to use real pictures for Twilight. And now is when the ghost of the copyrights and all the related stuff has appeared...although I'm realizing right now my careless and enthusiastic way to post pictures in the "post-apocalyptic picture thread" of this forum...ehemmm... :o

So, any feedback about that? Must we be worried about the matter? Any way to know if a picture is "free"? Any interesting website known for you to look for these "free images"?

Thanks in advance!!

[kato13]

So, any feedback about that? Must we be worried about the matter? Any way to know if a picture is "free"? Any interesting website known for you to look for these "free images"?

Thanks in advance!!

Start with Wikipedia for images. Many of their images have been released to the public domain. The second good source is government released photos. I know that any photo released by an entity of the US government is open for use.

For some equipment pictures I have also come across images that have had their ownership released. This is due to the fact that the expect resellers to sell their equipment and it is easier for them to just release the photo than to draft specific releases for potentially 1000s of individual vendors.

[avantman42]

My understanding is that under UK law, as soon as something is created (photograph taken, book/article/whatever written, etc) it is protected by copyright. I'm fairly sure that principle applies in most countries, so the photos are almost certainly copyrighted.

Whether or not it's a problem is another matter. There's an argument for saying that if they don't sue, there's no problem. If you want to keep on the right side of the law, you'd need to get permission, or use photos that specifically say they're licensed under licenses that allow you to use them.

Flickr and Google image search both allow you to search for images that have licenses that allow re-use if you use the advanced search.

[avantman42]

Start with Wikipedia for images.
Also Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)

[Marc]

Thank for the info. We've began the research following your clues.