Image Copyright for Local News Publishers: What the Law Actually Says

This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Copyright law is complex and fact-specific. If you have received a demand letter or believe you may be facing an infringement claim, consult a qualified intellectual property attorney.

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Copyright law is not complicated in its basics. A photograph belongs to the person who took it the moment they take it. Using that photograph without permission is infringement. The person who owns it can sue you for damages. That is most of what you need to understand to grasp why the demand letters arrive and why ignoring them is a bad idea.

The details get complicated. The basics do not.

Who Owns a Photograph

The photographer owns the photograph. Not the subject of the photo. Not the publication that assigned the story. Not the platform that hosts it. Not Google for indexing it. The person who pressed the shutter owns the copyright unless they signed it away in a contract.

Wire service photographers typically assign their rights to the agency as a condition of employment or contract. That is why AP owns AP photos, not the individual photographers who took them. Stock agencies acquire rights from photographers through licensing agreements. Getty owns a catalog of images because photographers and agencies have licensed those images to them for distribution.

When you use an AP photo without a license, you are not infringing on the photographer’s copyright directly. You are infringing on AP’s rights as the license holder. AP is the one who sends the enforcement firm. The photographer is largely out of the picture by that point.

What Copyright Protection Actually Covers

Copyright protection for photographs covers reproduction, distribution, and public display. Putting an image on a website is reproduction and public display. Both require permission from the rights holder unless an exception applies.

The protection is automatic. A photographer does not have to register a photograph for the copyright to exist. Registration with the US Copyright Office strengthens their enforcement options, specifically it allows them to seek statutory damages and attorney fees rather than having to prove actual damages, but the underlying copyright exists from the moment of creation.

This is where the “I did not know it was protected” defense breaks down. Ignorance of the copyright does not eliminate the infringement. It may affect the damages calculation in some cases, distinguishing innocent infringement from willful infringement, but it does not make the use legal.

What Fair Use Actually Means

Fair use is a legal doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without permission under specific circumstances. It is a defense, not a permission. You cannot invoke fair use before the fact to justify using an image. You invoke it after the fact if you are sued, and a court decides whether it applies based on a four-factor analysis.

The four factors are the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount of the work used, and the effect on the market for the original work. News reporting can support a fair use argument but it does not automatically create one. Using a full, unmodified photograph to illustrate a story is a weak fair use argument regardless of whether the publication is a news outlet.

The practical takeaway is this: fair use is not a reliable defense for the kind of image use that generates copyright enforcement letters. If you are counting on fair use to protect your publication, you are counting on a legal argument that requires a court to agree with you, which costs money and time regardless of the outcome.

What Licensing Actually Requires

A license is permission from the rights holder to use their work under defined conditions. Licenses specify what you can do with the image, for how long, in what contexts, and sometimes for what geographic markets.

Creative Commons licenses are real licenses with real conditions. A Creative Commons image labeled for reuse with attribution requires attribution. Using it without attribution is a license violation. A Creative Commons image labeled noncommercial cannot be used on a site that runs advertising without potentially violating the license terms.

A license from one publication does not extend to your publication. If a competitor licensed an AP photo and published it, you cannot republish that photo because they licensed it. Their license covers their use, not yours.

Licenses also expire. An image that was properly licensed for a specific campaign or time period may no longer be licensed after that period ends. Images that were licensed by a contributor who did not actually own the rights were never properly licensed at all, and the liability flows to the publisher who used them.

What the Damages Look Like

For registered works, the Copyright Act allows statutory damages between $750 and $30,000 per infringement at the court’s discretion. For willful infringement, that ceiling rises to $150,000. For innocent infringement, the floor can be reduced to $200.

In practice, most enforcement letters demand amounts well below the statutory maximum because the goal is settlement, not litigation. The demand is calibrated to be painful enough to prompt payment but not so large that the recipient concludes they have nothing to lose by fighting it. Somewhere between $750 and $2,500 is typical for a single image used by a small publisher.

Fighting a demand in court costs more than settling in almost every case involving a single image. That arithmetic is why the settlement model works and why it will keep working.

The Practical Implication

Every image on your site that you did not take yourself, did not license from a verified source, or cannot trace to confirmed public domain status is a potential liability. Some of those images will never be found. Some will be found next month. You do not get to know which ones in advance.

The law does not care about deadlines or staffing levels or whether your publication is a scrappy independent operation doing important local work on a thin budget. The copyright exists. The enforcement mechanism exists. The only variable you control is whether your workflow creates new exposure every time a story publishes.

PhotoCheckWP puts a check in that workflow. Every upload gets a reverse image search before it can go into content. Matches surface to the editor before the decision is made. The check is logged regardless of outcome. New exposure stops accumulating one upload at a time.

The Bottom Line

The law is straightforward. Images belong to their creators. Using them without permission is infringement. The damages are real and the enforcement programs that collect them are well-funded and automated.

You do not need a law degree to understand this. You need a workflow that does not create new liability every time your staff files a story under deadline.

That workflow exists. It costs ten dollars a month.

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The PhotoCheckWP Team writes about image copyright, editorial workflow, and the real cost of unlicensed images in digital publishing. We built this tool because we watched the problem happen from inside newsrooms — and because we paid for it ourselves.