Have Fun--but Be Careful--with Photo Cards

Making the switch from store-bought greeting cards to free ecards is practically a no-brainer: from the amount of money you save, to the ability to do last-minute shopping for birthdays and holidays, there really is no down-side to going completely paperless when you're sending cards to friends and loved ones. And the constantly-progressing technology of ecards makes the switch an even better idea than it was in the first place. Now, not only can you send customizable animated ecards, but you can also further personalize your cards with music; you can even add photos to your cards!

One thing you need to be careful about, though, is making sure you own the rights to images you use for photo ecards. It may be tempting to just go surf the web and download a particular image that happens to catch your eye, but that's a temptation you have to resist, or else you run a great risk of getting yourself in deep trouble. It could be something as relatively-simple as being bombarded with "cease and desist" orders from the company that owns the image; but it could also easily be a lawsuit with serious monetary implications.

Think I'm overstating the risk? In my own hometown, a small city in West Virginia, there's a second-hand clothing store, that specializes in providing clothing for needy children. To improve their visibility in the community, the owners of the store painted a very well-known cartoon mouse (which I'm not going to name, but which should be easy to figure out) on the side of their building. Within two weeks, the company that owned the rights to the image had filed a lawsuit against the store, seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. The suit was eventually settled out of court, for several thousand dollars.

So when you're making your own photo ecards, just be sure the photos you use come from your own personal collection, or that you have the legal right to use them. If it's a picture that you took yourself on your own camera, or one taken by a friend or relative, you have nothing to worry about. If it's an image from the Internet, though, the only way you can be certain you can legally use it is to check somewhere on the page for a message that gives you the explicit right to reproduce the image. If you can't find such a message, then guess what: you can't use it. Otherwise, you can always e-mail the copyright holder, and directly ask for permission to use the image, though depending upon the size of the owning company, it's often difficult to receive a response.

Above all else, though, have fun with photo ecards. Just make sure you don't end up paying a lot of money for something you thought was going to be free in the first place.