Good post!  

One of the BIGGEST issues Moderators have is with  mis-interpretation of a source site's T.O.U.

'Free for personal use' does not always allow redistribution - but sometimes it does....when you read further.

Also....BIG POINT...

If the 'source' site has a comment along the lines of 'all these images are free....la...la...la...but if one of these is yours and you wish it removed please contact us.....etc...'  then you CANNOT use ANYTHING from that site.

NOTHING.

Reason....they only THINK they are free to use....but clearly did NOT source them from their legitimate owners and thus cannot guarantee their authority to release.

I often grab images from the net through Google. Each time I make note of the author. This way I can give credit in a screenshot and a link to the image page. Most are free to use but I have found some that come with strings attached. One will say free for personal and/or commercial use and ask for a link to the site should you decide to use it. The only ones that don't have strings are the ones that say 'copyright has been' waived or something to that affect. I play safe and assume all have strings.

 Very useful websites, thank you so much! I only knew of one from the list (Creative Commons) and used whatever relevant images I could find there. By the way, isn't it like if you give any image proper credits (along with a link), it becomes free to use, since you have openly credited the person (say, photographer) in question?

Good question, Rusty23.

It's one thing to credit the original artist, quite another to use his work in any way. Merely crediting the original artist doesn't give you permission to alter/modify/use and/or distribute the image. That's what licensing is all about.

In order to use/modify, etc. the original artist's image, you must have permission to do so for personal/home use, or commercial use, or both. You also have to have permission to distribute the modified image.

No, crediting the original author is what you do AFTER FIRST obtaining consent to use his/her work....

mine are now on JoeUser and are total free to use any way anyone wants to.

I will eat a pile of doo doo if ONE person, ONE person reports after a gaming session that a company, police, etc. is suing them for copy right infringement for using an image that was obtainable off of a legit website (i.e. not off a pirate website, and you can just right click and save to desktop) in galciv3.

Come on, ONE person.  If companies and law enforcement are going after this, then they must have excellent supply of money to burn.

Its like car alarms.  I am waiting for one time in my life, just one time, where if a car alarm is going off, someone was genuinally trying to steal a car.  Everytime I have heard a car alarm, it was caused intentionally or unintentionally by some idiot driver who accidently or intentionally activated it.  Car alarms are the ultimate boy who cried wolf situation.  Car alarms are about as useful as movie credits.  If you aren't the actor or director, no one knows who you are, yet we have wasted millions of hours of labor and material costs just to add a few minutes of useless credits onto each movie ever created.

See....that's where your interpretation of reality doesn't correlate with the world's view.

Movie credits are the same as a signature on a painting.  It is the actual list of people who are harmed by film piracy.

You can be an uncaring slob and walk out during the credits or even before them....better still, if you cannot appreciate the people who create the film....simply don't go.

What actually totally SHITS ME is the ignorant arseholes of TV network penny pinchers who overdub the film credits with advertising for the next pathetic instalment of some shitty reality TV show - made for peanuts and aimed at the lowest common intellectual denominator.

But I agree...car alarms are less than useless.  Get an engine immobilizer. [or 2 pounds of C4 and a trembler switch]... 

Oh, and not saying its right or anything.  I am just saying enforcing image copyright in galciv 3 would be about as challenging as enforcing only missionary position sex in the military.  Technically, per the uniform code of military justice, other forms of sex are a violation and considered sodomy, but you dont have military enforcers in every bed room confirming the position.

A hamburger isn't 'a big production'....what results in the dunny after eating such plastic crap would classify as such, however...

Cars of the 'class' of Aston Martins have their engine builder credited via a plaque in the engine bay...so that analogy doesn't fit totally, either...

Oh, and most of just about every car you'll find native to the US would only end up with 'build credits' like R2D2 and C3PO, et al.  Humans don't get a look in.  That's why Motown is bankrupt...