If you modify the image to make it more original, still give credit to the original source.
I often do this and will state “Original image(s) from Pixabay — modified by author”. I get most of my images from Pixabay.
This seems like the way to handle images from movies and television as well. Using images from places such as IMDB.com or Netflix can be tricky, especially in a community such as CineTV.
One thing I would suggest for the cover image is to delay sourcing the image until after the first 120 characters of a post.
When people find our content from the search engine they use, the search engine will show the first 120 characters of the post in the search engine results page. It would be a waste of time and effort to produce a high-quality post only for the search engine to display “Original image(s) from Pixabay — modified by author”; that's not what we want the search engines to display.
This is where the Summary field on the Publish page at PeakD is crucial since the search engine will show that text instead. In the case of Ecency or Hive.Blog (or even LeoFinance), the first 120 characters of the text body serve the same purpose as the PeakD Summary field.
I apologize for the length of this comment, but I thought that detail would be useful for bloggers here to know.
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I agree. Generally if I need to give credit for images or share links to reference resources they go at the bottom of the post where I will enter NOTES and then list them.
Are images from IMDB and Netflix public domain?
This is where it gets tricky for me, and I don't know the answer. I would say "no" for these reasons:
It's not as people will believe that we are the creators of those images. No one believes you made images for Seven Samurai any more than I made images for Die Hard. For people like us, we would be entitled to "fair use" of images provided we give credit to the "owners" of the pictures or at least state where we found the images we ended up using.
Public domain is a beautiful thing, but it's not the same as "free". Sometimes we need to go with private domain, and this is where it gets tricky.
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Public domain is free as long as the Creative Commons license makes it so. The fair use doctrine for images gets pretty dicey especially when you're earning income on the work. Even giving credit doesn't necessarily cover you.
Fair use for written word is pretty firmly established, for images not so much and for music it's even worse.
When I was researching the use of lyrics for a Christmas Colouring book I was creating about the best advice that could be found short of talking to an IP lawyer was unless a song was in the public domain, don't use anything more than the title on a commercial use.