Thou Shalt Not Steal!
Crediting Content Owners In Articles
I have three publications here on Medium: Catness, Petness and ALFEW. In the submission guidelines for each, I always stress that any illustrations used — photographs or artwork — if not owned by the article submitter — need to have attribution given in the space for title (located under the image placed in the article).
This is one of my rules as editor, and I reserve the right to remove articles where the author is not complying.
Most people are very good about this. Once in a while attribution is not given, but when reminded, the writer goes back in and edits the piece so that the correct attribution is shown for each image.
If you take a photograph, or create a piece of artwork it is only right that you should be given credit for it. If someone uses one of your photographs or illustrations with or without permission and fails to give you credit, that is at very least, extremely discourteous;
Let us say that you go to a site like Pixabay or Unsplash and use one of their free images, for an article you are submitting to one of our publications. You need to copy the authors name and the link to their page at the given site and put this information under their image.
An image without credit implies that it’s the author’s own and so is dangerously close to image theft.
If you are using your own work to illustrate your piece, you do not have to label every illustration with your name, but it’s good to make a note: “all illustrations in this article are by the author” or words to that effect.
