A little matter of ethics

Anyone who has read my blog at all over the past few years knows that I sometimes like to jazz up my posts with a picture every now and again. Add a little visual flair to some otherwise boring posts, if you will.

And there was a time that I had no problem just doing a quick Google Image search, downloading a jpeg file of my choice from wherever and then uploading it to my Blogger post. Nary a thought went into who actually owns these properties, if anyone.

But lately, I've been trying to be a better blogger. Well, "better" might be a stretch. How about more responsible?

There is a common image warehouse available on Wikipedia (Wikimedia Commons) that seems to be as close to an ethical place as any to snag images. On my post about Tomoe Gozen last week, I grabbed an image they had on the site that had fallen into the public domain a long time ago. That felt clean to me.

But what do you all do? What do you all think?

I'm too lazy to constantly snap my own photos that might go along well with my posts, so grabbing images off of the Internet is my go-to play in this arena. With that in mind, I have a few questions:

1. Do you download images off the Internet to post on your blog?
2. Do you use a common image warehouse or will any image do?
3. Do you credit the image source?
4. If so, do you research that source to make sure they were the ORIGINAL source?
5. How often do you masturbate?  (Sorry...thought I could slip that one in)
6. Even if I use something like Wikipedia Commons, is naming the image source necessary?
7. What, ethically, are we bloggers required to do in a world in which nicking someone else's images is so damn easy?

Now I have never been contacted to remove an image from my blog, but it is something I have thought about.  The only change, besides trying to only get pictures from Wikipedia recently, that I have made to my image policy in the past was something that NYC Watchdog wrote about a long time ago.  I'd provide the link, but it really was a long time ago.  It had to do with Blogger's two ways of embedding pictures.  One was from a file on your computer and the other was from a link to someone else's site.  He wrote about how using the second option was wrong because you would be stealing someone else's bandwidth or something.  I'm not sure about the technical aspects of it, but it made sense to me at the time so I stopped doing it.  Frankly, I'm not even sure that Blogger has that option anymore.

My point of this whole schmeggegie, is that I'm trying to to the right thing here.  If not in the past, then at least going forward.  And I'd genuinely like to hear your opinion.  Especially about question #5.

___________________________________________________

Note: Remember to play the Badgerdaddy Trivia Challenge every day. That often?  You dirty birds!