Google Ganking
As a web designer, you may find it inspirational to run a Google or Flickr image search for topics around which you’re building a web site. Let’s say you’re building a web site for a bike shop. If the owner of the shop hasn’t given you any images to work with yet, doing an image search for mountain biking, bike races, road bikes, and other related subjects can give you a better visual understanding of the topic, and an idea about the types of images you’ll want to use on the site. Usually, this type of search will return some images that would work well in your design. You might even feel the urge to save some of those images to your computer, open them up in Photoshop and crop, resize, and modify them a little to fit your needs. This is know as Google Ganking and it’s a serious problem in web design. Unless the images on a web site are specifically marked as being free to use or available in the public domain, you can assume that they are copyrighted by the site’s owner, and therefore you’ll need permission to use them. You may think the image’s owner will never notice your rip of his or her work, but you run the risk of enduring something as embarrassing as having a cease and desist letter sent to your client, or something as serious as a lawsuit.
