Our personal copyright policy
Copyright is often a sticky issue in the world of the internet. Copyright law in general can be a confusing place. There is one simple rule though – if you didn’t create it, you don’t own it. Whether it’s taking images from Google searches or blatantly stealing blog posts, as a site owner, we see it all the time. Just because it’s on the internet does not make it free. You can’t take what you want and claim it as yours. That simple.
Of course, when blogging and spending so much time crafting a site full of real estate information, you want people to read your posts and learn from them. When I write a post about a current real estate issue, there’s a reason for it. It’s based off of something I’ve seen happen. I’m trying to help educate everyone I can, so that the same problems or concerns don’t arise for someone else down the line. And so I blog about it. I clarify it. I explain it and give examples. With that in mind, here is our personal copyright policy regarding the words and images on this site.
Copyright Policy – Images
If the image is in a blog post, it most likely is taken from a source like Flickr. We use Flickr because we can search for Creative Commons licensed materials. We use this to avoid lawsuits – by using the appropriately licensed photos, we are able to get fantastic visuals for a site without having to constantly take the photographs ourselves. Since these images are from other sources, we suggest you never copy them. If you want to use the photo for your own purposes, follow the attribution link we provide at the bottom of each post.
As for images of homes for sale, we’d prefer you didn’t take these. Why? Well, they’re actually licensed to us from the photographers. The photographers own the copyright to the photos. We don’t mind if people share them via Facebook and other social media, but we hope they’re sharing them with the link back to the home for sale. Seems fair enough.
Copyright Policy – Blog Posts
Kimberly Howell Properties owns the copyright to everything written on these pages (unless otherwise noted). We encourage people to share our posts with the world and we offer many ways to do it (see the bottom of every post). You can also link back to us if you write something and want to reference us. We even don’t mind if you pull a few sentences here and there in order to reference something specific we say on these pages. We draw the line at outright copying. Do not select an entire post and cut and paste it into your site or blog. If you do, there better be a link back to us and a reference to the fact that we are the original author. Failure to do so? You’ll be in violation of our copyright policy and US copyright law. So don’t do it.
We want people to share, we want people to spread the word, but we draw the line at content theft. If you like something we published, please share, but please attribute it to it’s original source (and we love the links for SEO purposes).
image courtesy of marfis75
