If something is posted online and you can access it – sharing A LINK requires NO PERMISSION WHATSOEVER. You can publish the **link** – not the content of what is at the link but the LINK ITSELF – or send it to someone, or tweet it, or Facebook it, whatever.
However, the CONTENT of what is linked to – the words and/or images on the page that the link TAKES you to – may not be lifted without express permission, *unless* the site has a specific disclaimer/advisory saying that everything is open to public use, repurposing, whatever, which is fairly uncommon. The only exception: If the work was created by a public employee in the course of performing his/her duties. (This is why, for example, you will see us and other news organizations republish pictures of government facilities taken from gov’t websites.)
Again, I hope that’s clear. A link – the actual text such as
can be linked, sent, shared with impunity. Don’t ever let ANYONE tell you that you cannot *link* to something that is publicly visible. (We actually have had a couple people claim that over the years and it is laughable. If you don’t want someone to link to your webpage, then make it password protected.)
But you cannot just download a photo you find on a webpage and send it to someone, post it on a page, post it to social media, etc. That is copyright violation and out-and-out theft.
You technically are within your rights to right-click on a photo and send the resulting LINK to someone. However, as a content creator/publisher, I would say that’s not particularly ideal because it means you’re sending it without the context, without the credit, etc. And even if you send that photo-only link with the best of intentions, you can’t control what happens to it next place down the line; over the course of a couple months, a few years ago, both we and another news organization inadvertently published one photo each that was taken by a photographer from the other news organization – then redistributed as if it were somebody else’s work. We had photographed a local business owner; the local business lifted the photo from our site and posted it on social media without the link to the accompanying article putting the photo into context; somebody else lifted the photo off Facebook and sent it to the other news organization along with an announcement relating to the business! Imagine our surprise when we saw our photo uncredited on another commercial news website.
On the flip side, we got an announcement about a local arts event, asked if there was a relevant photo of preparations for the event, and the organizers sent us several. Unfortunately, they had attached to the e-mail not only photos they took, but photos taken by another news photographer who had apparently sent them copies in addition to publishing some on their own site. The entire group of photos was represented to us as taken by volunteer photographers on behalf of the arts organization, so we chose one and then were startled to get a note from the other news publication saying, that photo was taken by our photographer, take it down immediately.
Sorry to digress. I do think the idea of sending someone a link to the WSB Flickr gallery is a good one:
The photos are almost entirely taken by other contributors, each of whom is linked to their photo, and we opened it with a disclaimer that posting to the group means permission is given for us to publish the photo if we choose. Flickr does have a setting where people can disable downloads if they choose.
Hope that helps a bit.
Tracy