My son has a school project to build a small website using tools available on the internet. He searched Google Images and picked the photo of a man working on a car (mechanic) and added it to his web site, which is now available on the internet. What if in the very unlikely event this person sees himself published on a kid's web site ? Is this considered breaking copyright laws? We were told that all images on Google are not copyright protected so he should be OK. We just want to be sure. Thanks.

Your son is using the photo only for his own project, and is not selling copies to friends and relatives. Any photos on Internet that are copyright protected are so marked.

Hi, moonlite!

There are millions of images available on the Internet where it's not indicated that they have been formally copyrighted or not. If in doubt, I would suggest asking people on the website from which any information is obtained to make sure it's okay to use an image of something from their site on another website. Also, I would do that for any written content from another website. Please read up some on the Fair Use Act. It's on many websites that can be found via clicking on the following link.

Copyright Fair Use Act - Google Search

If someone where to especially, find an image of a person, by the way that the image is labeled and use it on a website without permission, then there could be issues. The label of the image can be in the image itself and also the way that it might actually be labeled on another site where it's used. You right click on Properties, on the image of a website to see how it's labeled within the image. If the label within the image is still in the image on another website, it most likely can be found when people do searches for things in Google or on another search engine. What if the interior label of the image is the name of the person and what they're doing? I hope that you see my point here.

Here's an example of just a simple problem that can happen when someone thinks another person has used what they have without their permission.

One of several things that I do for a living, are musical in nature. I like to beat all of the music stores in my area so that others will find me first when they look on the Internet for the musical services that I provide. The names of one of the music stores has the name of the family that owns the store. It's the type of name that can also be used in a sentence as a verb.

A customer of the music store owner brought a copy into the owner of what I'd posted on the Internet. The music store owner called me up and was very irate with me, and was close to threatening me with some sort of infringement on him. I know that I wasn't in the wrong, but removed the use of the word in my ads for around where I work. Really, it wasn't my fault that his last name worked perfectly with my ads as a verb.

No infringement there! Just an obvious way to advertise to beat the competition!

The owner didn't "like" the fact that I used even words from his website. They weren't even phrases that I was using! If someone were to find an image of me on the web and use it on their site, I wouldn't "like" it either! Not even "liking" something could lead to other things...

Thanks!