New Art Images Are Available for Free Online Commercial Use

When people heard that the Art Institute of Chicago made 52,000 images available with a CC0 license, graphic designers and webmasters were ecstatic. The Art Institute is joining the Met and The British Library in putting high-resolution images in the public domain for anyone to use however they wish.
The copyright holder waives all rights worldwide with a CC0 license. Unlike the Creative Commons Zero license, Creative Commons licenses may only allow for non-commercial use, attribution required or verbatim copies only depending on the copyright holder's wishes.
Photographers who publish their images on a public photo-sharing website should be very careful which license they select. A photographer could find his or her work used for commercial purposes to promote a product that the photographer finds offensive. As long as the person using the photo gives credit to the photographer or follows the rules for the specific CC license chosen by the photographer, the person can use the photo as they see fit.
Webmasters and marketers need to be careful and check the license of every photo that they use, preserving a copy of image's listing to serve as proof that they used the image legally. Getty Images and other companies that sell stock photos will send cease-and-desist letters to anyone who uses their images without paying for the image first. The may also ask for retroactive payments.
Policing images on the Internet, where people cut and paste images they find with a Google search, is challenging. Stock photo companies have software for tracking images. Stealing images is commonplace since there are people who believe if they find an image in a Google image search, the image is theirs to use as they see fit. Anyone who does need images for ads or their website can find numerous sources of high-quality images with CC0 licenses. For more information click here https://www.artic.edu/collection?is_public_domain=1.