The pictures that are posted of the trees I have for sale on Ebay are the actual pictures of the plants I have in my nursery, they are not taken from other people trees. The first pictures in the listing is a generic pictures that could be mine or taken off from the internet of the mango. The pictures taken from the internet are not stolen as the ones I do use are not trademarked. When possible I will take pictures of our own fruits.
We do try our best to send on pictures when requested. However we can have many varieties of one plant and an not take pictures of every plant we have in our nursery for sale. Most of the plants we take pictures of to our customers we have many that are very similar to each other and we then chose one instead of taking pictures of 20 different plants that really look the same.
I think you better rethink what you said. You can just take other pictures from the internet. Without their authorization, and use them as yours cause youdont think gthey are trademarked or hallmarked.
If the Images have not been copyrighted, or the creator of them has not taken steps to copyright them, then yes, the images in question can be used without incurring penalties irrespective of the fact that the rule of thumb is that whoever created the images essentially owns them owing to the principle of fair use, which is extremely complicated.There are some high profile precedents in which professional photographers have sued various organizations for having profited from their photographs, however that is not the kind of thing that would lend weight to an infringement claim because in the case of the image of the mango tree, the intellectual property
is a modicum of enterprise, not the primary commodity of sale.Unless it's nude pictures of you straddling a duck or whatever, in which case you're protected by DMCA privacy exceptions, there's not going to be a lot you can do about it without holding copyright.
I recommend reading the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). The long and short of it is, if you want to be absolutely sure your images are protected, you need to have registered your image with some copyright Authority or other in order to claim copyright infringement and these need to bear that watermark. You should also timestamp them ( as the date of copyright). This because of, again, the mechanism of fair use, and additionally there are subversive ways of relegating images into the public domain; time is being of those ways.
Look at Oscar's Images of his fruit--that's how it should be done. If theoretically I used on of Oscar's images without permission, he would be within his right to sue me (after I failed to comply with a C&D). This would be expensive (suing people just is) but yes--if it went before a magistrate, it would go his way. Definitely; especially if I tried something greasy like removing the copyright symbol and timestamp, in which case he could slap me in the face with the spoliation bat to boot.
If you need to use a photograph of something and don't have one, try doing a Public Domain Search. By doing this you're covering yourself and aren't running the risk of pissing anybody off.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-free-websites-public-domain-images-free-stock-photos/
