Copyright arises automatically in an original work and gives its maker two exclusive rights that matter online: the right to reproduce the work and the right to communicate it to the public. Almost every dispute about online use turns on the second of these, and on the question of whether a particular act made the work available to a new public.

Publishing is not the same as being findable

A work placed on a freely accessible website has been communicated to the public by the person who put it there. That does not put it in the public domain, and it does not give others a licence to reuse it. Content being findable says nothing about whether it may be copied; the only things that may be freely reused are works whose protection has expired, works released under a licence that permits it, and material that never attracted copyright in the first place.

Linking, framing and embedding

A hyperlink to a work that the rights holder has itself made freely available is not a new communication to the public: the audience is the same. That is why ordinary linking is safe.

It changes where the work was published without the rights holder’s consent. Linking to such material can itself be an infringement where the person linking knew or ought to have known that the source was unlawful, and knowledge is presumed where the link is placed for profit. A commercial site therefore carries a duty to check its sources that a private blog does not.

Embedding a video or image so that it appears within your own page follows the same logic, with an important exception: where the rights holder has taken measures against embedding, circumventing them is an infringement.

The quotation right

Quoting is permitted for purposes such as criticism, review, news reporting or a comparable purpose, provided the work was lawfully made public, the quotation is proportionate to that purpose, the context is not altered, and the source and the maker’s name are stated. A quotation may include an image where the image is genuinely the subject of the discussion.

Illustrating an article with someone else’s photograph because it fits the topic is not a quotation. That is the most common infringement on business websites, and it is the one that generates most demands for payment.

Photographs and people

Two rights run in parallel. The copyright belongs to the photographer, and using the photograph requires a licence. Separately, an identifiable person shown may have portrait rights and can oppose publication where they have a reasonable interest. Both have to be cleared before an image is used commercially.

If your work is used without permission

Secure dated evidence of the use before writing. Identify who is actually publishing – the site owner, the advertiser or the platform. A notice to the host under its notice-and-action procedure is often faster than a claim. Damages are usually measured on the licence fee that would have been payable, with an uplift where the maker was not credited.