Chris The Story Reading Ape posted a link the other day that got me thinking. It was about a blogger – a cautionary tale, really. She had been using images from the internet to illustrate her blog posts, but had been unaware that she didn’t have permission to use those images. When a photographer called her out for using one of his images without permission, she found herself liable for court costs and a usage fee, money she didn’t have to spend.

Quite a few years ago, I worked in advertising, and one of my roles was as media buyer for a large agency. That meant I had to find images for creative teams and then, if they wanted to use them in an ad, I had to negotiate a usage fee for the image based on who was using it, where it would be seen, for how long, at…