If you’re unfamiliar with copyrights and just want to grab an image to use on your website or something similar there are probably a lot of confusing terms you’ve seen like creative commons, public domain, and so on.

Public domain refers to multimedia that is free for anyone to use anyway they would like. Most of this material is either dated and no longer can be protected by copyright, was created by government organizations (all government works are public domain by default), or was specifically released into the public domain by the creator.

Creative commons is a sort of open licensing system that allows the content owner to specify the terms. The most common type of creative commons license and the one you’ll see on the sites found on our lists is sharealike. This license specifies that you can use the content however you would like as long as you include attribution to the creator and include a copy of the sharealike license.

Royalty free usually implies an upfront cost to purchase multimedia with the understanding that it can then be used many times or in many ways without any additional fees or per use fees. These kinds of services and multimedia databases are great if you need access to higher quality or larger selections of content and are willing to pay for that access but not per use.

The last term I want to go over is copyrighted. When something is copyrighted the owner of that work retains all rights over it. This means you have to negotiate with them specifically over the terms of your use and price, etc. This can be a hassle and is usually quite expensive depending on the work you’re trying to negotiate a deal for. However, sometimes you really do have to pay to get the best work.

I hope this clears up some of the most basic terminology you might find here or on other sites related to copyright, public domain, creative commons, and licensing in general. Always make sure you know how the media you’re thinking of using is licensed and what that means in terms of the law.

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