Copyright and simple good behaviour.

[Sunday Driver]

It's easy to miss the origin of some websites - particularly Belgian or Canadian ones which you think are French.....

 

[Bugsy]

One thing that is confusing to me, as a non-copyright expert.

I've just had a look at your new forum and must say what an excellent idea, well presented and bound to be a great success.

It does, however,  contain avatars of the new regional designs that must surely have been 'borrowed' from the web.

Surely this is no different to your original complaint or am I simply missing something?

[Will]

Talking about individual countries is, frankly, irrelevant when discussing copyright. There is an international agreement, the Berne Convention, which sets out the conditions and requirements.

http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p08_berne_convention

That same site also highlights many misapprehensions, such as the fact that anything on the internet is in the public domain, and thus free from copyright (not so - 'publicly accessible' and 'public domain' are two entirely different things). Or that copyright needs to be registered, or claimed through a copyright notice (again, not so, or at least not since 1989 when the USA finally signed up to the Berne Convention; conveniently a lot of US sources are still stuck in the past). Or that other people's work can be copied by a non-profit or not-for-gain web site - again, definitely not the case.

[Mr Coeur de Lion]

The thing is, there are tons of sites that offer free images where you can get pretty much any image you want. http://www.sxc.hu/ is such an example.

If that doesn't have it, istockphoto.com is even better and costs just a euro or so for a good professional quality image.

I find either of these sites good enough for my web design needs.

And if people want free content for their site, there are literally thousands of article directory sites where content is free to take and post on their own site as long as everything is left as in and not edited, eg links and the like.