I have a website that displays random images from a database of several thousand images. The images are funny random images that people have added captions to or edited in photoshop.
I believe these images are public domain and were created for anyone to see and enjoy, but I'm not sure if this applies to the internet.
Anyways, I have seen the images on my site appear on several different websites in the past.
My question is, would it be legal to offer any of these images to be printed on a t-shirt? The sale would not be made through my website, but another service that does t-shirt printing. But they do pull the image off my website to print on the shirt, and I would be receiving about a 40% commission.
These images are widely re-used and distributed over the internet, and there's no clear indication who the original owner or publisher is for any of the images.
This seems like a pretty big grey area to me, so I was just wondering if this is something I can legally do.
The site is hosted and operated out of the U.S. by the way.
I believe these images are public domain and were created for anyone to see and enjoy, but I'm not sure if this applies to the internet.
Anyways, I have seen the images on my site appear on several different websites in the past.
My question is, would it be legal to offer any of these images to be printed on a t-shirt? The sale would not be made through my website, but another service that does t-shirt printing. But they do pull the image off my website to print on the shirt, and I would be receiving about a 40% commission.
These images are widely re-used and distributed over the internet, and there's no clear indication who the original owner or publisher is for any of the images.
This seems like a pretty big grey area to me, so I was just wondering if this is something I can legally do.
The site is hosted and operated out of the U.S. by the way.