This post originally appeared on the Visual Learning Center and used with permission

Promise's lineup of Pegasus3 solutions includes full-featured, update-inclusive ChronoSync software and one user license (with an option to upgrade), and is now available at Promise's eStore. The ChronoSync Pegasus Edition is available now at Promise's eStore (in North America only) for existing owners of Pegasus3 (and prior generation) models. Alternatives to ChronoSync for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone and more. Filter by license to discover only free or Open Source alternatives. This list contains a total of 25+ apps similar to ChronoSync. List updated: 1/30/2020 12:28:00 PM. Dear valued Promise Pegasus Customers, PROMISE Technology appreciates and values your continuous support, we are writing to inform you an upcoming end of providing the ChronoSync Software 'Pegasus Edition' License Key Free Download on the PROMISE Technology product lines “Pagasus3 Series” and “Pagasus32 Series”. Nov 24, 2009 Alternatives to ChronoSync for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone and more. Filter by license to discover only free or Open Source alternatives. This list contains a total of 25+ apps similar to ChronoSync. List updated: 1/30/2020 12:28:00 PM. ChronoSync is the complete data management utility for macOS that allows you to efficiently synchronize or backup files and folders from one disk location to another. Before you start using ChronoSync, however, you must decide whether to perform a synchronization or backup operation.

What was once a web filled with code and scrolling text, the Internet is now the world’s largest conglomerate of images. And as visual content continues to rule, the number of images available online will only grow. But just because you can Google an image — and technically copy or save it — doesn’t mean the web is a free-for-all of visual data.

Photographers and designers need to put food on the table. If every online image was available for free, there would be a lot more starving artists. Fortunately for them, copyrights apply in cyberspace just as in print. And anyone using an image without appropriate rights and permissions can find themselves in plenty of hot water.

Understanding the ins and outs of image licensing and usage can save digital marketers, web designers and other content curators from unnecessary penalties, ranging from cease and desist notices to lawsuits and financial demands.

Want to be sure you properly use images in your online content? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Just follow our five simple steps, and you just might save yourself a load of legal trouble.

You can also save and bookmark this quick visual guide below (based on Curtis Newbold’s original flow chart and redesigned with his permission using Visme) to help you decide whether you can use a specific image or not:

Can I Use That Picture?

Created using Visme. An easy-to-use Infographic Maker.

Understand Types of Image Licenses

Unless you’ve taken the image yourself — someone else owns the rights to use it. Whether the copyright owner provides free reign of the image’s use — or allows it for a fee or under certain circumstances — varies widely across the industry.

Still, savvy publishers understand exactly which images they can use and under what instances. The first step is understanding the different types of image licenses:

Flat Fee
Also known as contracted work, a flat-fee license relates to a single photo that is licensed and intended for one user.

Rights Managed
Refers to the purchase of a photo which can only be used one time and as specified by the license.

Royalty Free
The royalty-free licensing model is the most popular type of license for stock photos and often the most affordable, although royalty free should not be confused with free from cost. Instead, the term refers to the absence of additional royalties for additional uses of the image. The only cost variable is generally the size of the image or image file provided.

Creative Commons Licenses
The Internet is full of amateur photography. But amateur doesn’t mean without copyright. To help manage the sharing of copyrighted work, Creative Commons licenses were developed. The licenses allow copyright owners to freely share their work, but control the conditions under which it is used.

Correctly Use Creative Commons Images

The Creative Commons organization manages six types of licenses that vary in their openness of use, ranging from allowing any type of use as long as the creator is attributed to only allowing personal use of the original work.

Each of the license types were written in conformity with international copyright treaties and adapted to the local laws of more than 50 countries. When choosing free stock images licensed by Creative Commons, users should be aware of the six Creative Commons licenses, including:

CC BY – attribution

This license allows others to distribute, modify and adapt the image, even commercially, as long as the copyright holder is credited.

CC BY-SA – attribution, share-alike

The license allows others to reuse, modify and adapt the work, even for commercial use, as long as the original copyright holder is credited, and any new creations are shared under identical terms — i.e., share-alike. Often compared to open-source software licenses, any new works that use any part of the original image must carry the same Creative Commons license. CC BY-SA is most-commonly associated with Wikipedia.

CC BY-ND – attribution, noderivs

This license allows for the redistribution or content — whether commercial or noncommercial — as long as it is used unchanged and in whole, and the original copyright holder is accredited. In other words, no derivatives of the original work are allowed.

CC BY-NC – attribution, non-commercial

This license allows others to use, modify and adapt works for non-commercial purposes only, provided the original creator is credited. Any new works that use any part of the original work must also be attributed to the original creator and be used non-commercially, although they do not have to license their own derivatives on the same terms.

CC BY-NC-SA – attribution, non-commercial, share-alike

This license allows others to reuse, modify and adapt works for non-commercial use, as long as the original copyright holder is credited and new creations are licensed under identical terms as the original.

CC BY-NC-ND – attribution, non-commercial, noderivs

The most restrictive of the Creative Commons licenses, content can be downloaded and shared with others as long as the copyright holder is credited, but images cannot be changed in any way or used commercially.

Utilize Images Within the Public Domain

Although it’s not a license, per se, public domain makes up a large portion of stock images. As the name suggests, the copyright is owned by the public, and images are free for anyone to use, reuse, modify, adapt and distribute. While the images are copyright-free, it’s still professional courtesy to attribute the work’s original creator whenever possible.

How Do You Know if Something Is in the Public Domain?

Works can be part of the public domain in three instances:

  • Their copyright has expired. In the United States, any work published anywhere in the world prior to Jan. 1, 1923, is in the public domain. Other countries may follow different policies on length of copyrights.
  • They were released into the public domain by the copyright holder. In such cases, the copyright holder needs only release their work with an accompanying statement releasing all rights to the work. Images licensed under the Creative Commons CC designation are released to the public domain.
  • They are ineligible for copyright protection. In the United States, works created by a government agency are not eligible for copyright protection and can be used by the public. Content that does not rely on human creativity is also ineligible for copyright. A list of bare facts will belong to the public domain, while an article based on those facts and an infographic referencing them are both copyright protected.

Understand Types of Image Uses

License

Identifying the types of image licenses is only effective if a user also understands the ways in which content can be used. Using an image that is licensed for non-commercial use in a business context can bring negative consequences, just like failing to pay for its use.

What is commercial use?

Chronosync License Key

As previously mentioned, some licenses allow the reuse of images for non-commercial purposes only. But non-commercial is a broader category than the name may suggest.

Obviously, the use of content for any for-profit advertising and marketing purpose is commercial. But so is creating an internal company brochure, updating a blog and creating a social media profile.

Chronosync License

A blogger who doesn’t sell ads or make any profit may be able to claim non-commercial use, but only if no type of commerce occurs or even appears on the website. If anyone is financially profiting from the content in any way, it’s almost certainly for commercial use.

What is non-commercial use?

So what types of use are considered non-commercial? Some images are released for editorial use only and only can be used to illustrate news-related stories.

U.S. Copyright Law also allows copyrighted materials to be used in the course of face-to-face teaching activities, so teachers and students can use copyrighted images for classroom presentations, assignments and learning aids. Non-profit organizations can also use images non-commercially to request donations and promote events.

What is Fair Use?

Chronosync

Fair use is a doctrine originating in U.S. law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder. The copyright limitation is intended to balance the interests of copyright holders with the public interest by allowing certain limited uses that could otherwise be considered infringement.

U.S. courts have cited as examples of fair use such as commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, scholarship and research. Unfortunately, the doctrine still leaves a giant gray area and there is never a guarantee that your use will qualify as fair. In fact, the only way to get a definitive answer on whether or not a particular use is “fair” is to have the issue resolved in court.

The qualify as fair use, courts examine four criteria:

  1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether it is of a commercial nature or for nonprofit educational purposes
  2. The nature of the copyrighted work — courts grant more leeway to copies of factual works such as biographies than from fictional works such as plays or novels.
  3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole — sometimes the amount of material copied is so small the court permits it without even conducting a fair-use analysis.
  4. The impact the use bears upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work — whether your use deprives the copyright owner of income or undermines a new or potential market for the copyrighted work.

To get a better idea if the use of a specific image may be considered fair, you can also fill out the checklist above.

Since there is no arithmetic method for determining fair use, these should be used as general guidelines in your fair use analysis and do not, by any means, constitute legal advice.

Avoid Penalties for Copyright Infringement

Copyright infringement occurs when any party uses a whole or part of an image without permission, beyond the scope of a permission or license, adapting the image without permission or even asking another artist to identically recreate the image.

It’s a crime, and it can occur even unintentionally, which is why understanding image licensing and usage rules is vital to today’s digital marketers and visual content designers. If a website designer is hired by a company, and that designer steals images without the company’s knowledge, everyone is still guilty.

Those who break copyright law can incur monetary damages, lawsuits, costly legal fees and even criminal charges, depending on the severity of the theft. As with most of life, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Your Turn

90% of all information transmitted to our brains is visual.
People remember…

More great resources on copyright in photography can be found on my blog here:

Related Posts

Whatever your backup or sync scenario, ChronoSync has got you covered!

Q.

A.

Yes! ChronoSync 4.9.5 is optimized for Catalina.
No. The reason is because Apple places restrictions on what system resources can be accessed by any application sold in MAS. This makes it impossible to offer the full ChronoSync feature set to MAS purchasers. ChronoSync Express, a more limited version of ChronoSync, isavailable in MAS.
We do not offer educational pricing, but do offer volume discounts to everyone. Discounts on 5 & 25 packs are available online. For information on larger quantity discounts, email our sales department with your inquiry.

Chronosync License Key

ChronoSync requires macOS 10.11 or newer. 95 MB of free disk space is also needed. Older versions are available for systems as far back as 10.3.
No. If you are synchronizing between two computers, you only need to install ChronoSync on one Mac and connect to the other Mac. You can connect to the other Mac via File Sharing or install ChronoAgent on the other Mac for better performance. ChronoSync will automatically mount the remote computer for you with either option.
Time Machine is the system level backup service that's built into macOS. It works transparently, behind the scenes, to take snapshots of your files. Backups are implicit but you have little control over what is backed up, when they are backed up and where the backups are placed. ChronoSync provides explicit control over your backups allowing you to control what is backed up, where it is placed and how often it is backed up. ChronoSync actually works quite complimentary with Time Machine. For more details, click here.
Yes, but only files and folders under the User and/or Home folders.
Yes. By using InterConneX in conjunction with ChronoSync, you can backup or synchronize files to an iPad and to an iPhone.
For backup operations, any file and folder that the logged-in user has read-access to. If you can open the folder in Finder and see its contents, and open the documents in an application, they can be backed up by ChronoSync. This typically encompasses everything in your Home folder.
For synchronization operations, you will also need write-access to these files so they can be changed. You typically have read and write access to the same files so this is rarely a problem. You should be careful about synchronizing the contents of your Library folder with another computer, however, since it typically contains computer-specific information.
ChronoSync also has the 'Local Volumes (Admin Access)' option that can read & write to any file or folder on your system provided the user has administrator credentials. If connected to a remote computer via ChronoAgent, you can also gain full access to all files and folders on that computer as well.
Yes. You can synchronize certain files, like document files, between any OS that your Mac can copy to. For instance, you can synchronize your Documents between Mountain Lion and Yosemite or even Mountain Lion and Windows XP. However, you can only perform a Home-to-Home sync between the same version of macOS, meaning you must sync Yosemite to Yosemite but not Yosemite to Mountain Lion. Furthermore, you need to make sure that your iApps like iPhoto, iTunes and iCal are the same version.
Not safely. ChronoSync can merge the contents of two iPhoto libraries together, but iPhoto won't recognize those changes. This is because iPhoto tracks all its photos in a private database file. If you merged the contents of two libraries, you'd be making changes that aren't reflected in the database and iPhoto may lose track of your photos.
YES. In the Setup panel for each target, change 'Connect to' to 'Local Volumes (Admin Access)' to gain access to all files in the target regardless of permissions. This will only work for drives connected directly to your Mac. You cannot gain administrative access to any volume mounted via file sharing. To connect to a remote Mac with full administrative access, you can always use ChronoAgent.
Yes! ChronoSync can make bootable backups to locally attached, internal and external hard drives. It can also make remote bootable backups over a network connection very easily, by combining it with ChronoAgent. ChronoSync 4.8 will be able to create bootable backups of APFS volumes to APFS or HFS+ volumes when High Sierra is released later this fall.
Yes. Take a look at how to Synchronize with a Disk Image to see how you can protect and encrypt your data.
ChronoSync is available in English, French, German, and Japanese.
No, it does not. Just be sure to launch ChronoSync once via double-click in Finder from its new location so that location path identifiers can be updated.
No. ChronoSync does not install any kernel extensions or patch any system service nor does it bypass high level system APIs to communicate directly with devices. ChronoSync operates exclusively in 'user land' and will not affect the overall stability of your system. ChronoSync DOES perform very high intensity disk I/O and, very rarely, may expose underlaying hardware and/or driver issues. If such occurs, our support team will be happy to assist in solving the problem even though it does not reside in ChronoSync itself.
We get this question from time-to-time and, in the current race-to-the-bottom app economy where $4.99 apps seem expensive, we can see why it’s easy to balk at a $49.99 purchase. The fact of the matter is that ChronoSync is not expensive. First of all, it’s the only price you'll have to pay. You will never have to worry about an upgrade or support fee with ChronoSync. With every new update (and we've released more than 60), you can actually consider your cost of ownership going down!
Secondly, software development is expensive. We've spent several million dollars developing, maintaining and supporting ChronoSync over its lifetime. It needs to be sustainably priced in order to continue that. Otherwise you'll be stuck with an un-maintained and un-supported product and we definitely don’t want to see that!
Backup is when you copy files to a destination so that you have a redundant copy, in case something goes wrong with the original.
Synchronization is when you copy and work on files within both targets, like a desktop and a laptop.
We get this question at least as often as 'Why is ChronoSync so Expensive?' — a fact that we find somewhat humorous. The unfortunate reality (for us) is that the current race-to-the-bottom app economy imposes a very strong downward influence on the price of software. Back in the 80's and 90's, it would have been easy to charge $199 or more for such a product — but not today! Luckily we are very efficient developers with very low overhead, so we can continue to offer professional grade software at such low prices.
ChronoSync Usage
You can register ChronoSync with the same license on two Macs provided you are the sole user of both Macs.
If registering with a Multi-Mac License Key, then you can register that license key on the amount of Mac Computers stated in the License Panel.
To move a license key from an old Mac to a new Mac, Unregister on the old Mac and then Register on the new Mac.
Contact sales@econtechnologies.com for any clarification.
You'll receive the 'Selected targets are linked to mismatched macOS versions, which may lead to erratic behavior of the destination system' message if the installed versions of macOS differ in a Data Volume-only backup. Synchronization will not be allowed unless you correct the OS version or you 'Ignore' the error.