copyright terms-of-service
Is it legal to display images found using public APIs on my website?
<p>I have a website about tourist attractions all around the world and we use automatic geolocation based searches in Flickr/Panoramio/Foursquare/500px photo bases using their public APIs. To filter out private data we use mandatory parameter &quot;public only&quot;.</p>
<p>So, the question is: is it legal to display such search results on our pages or not? Say, in accordance with the terms of Flickr (<a href="http://www.flickr.com/services/api/tos/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.flickr.com/services/api/tos/</a>) and Panoramio (<a href="http://www.panoramio.com/api/data/terms.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.panoramio.com/api/data/terms.html</a>) API usage -- any person or company that uses its API can use the images found by it in non-commercial goal while linking back to Flickr/Panoramio.</p>
<p>If your answer is &quot;no&quot; then why and how do Google, Yahoo and other search engines display search results in services like Google Images? And Facebook and other social networks displays such images in Share posts?</p>

<p>In general, linking to a URL found by a search, and displaying a &quot;thumbnail&quot; image of that result has been held to be lawful under US copyright law, on the ground that such use is transformative and of public benefit. This is how search engines are allowed to display images in a much reduced format with their results.</p>
<p>The current (as of July 2021) Flickr Terms say: &quot;If the primary purpose of your application is to derive revenue, it is considered a commercial application.&quot; They do not currently say anything about permission nto display search results, it seems that they have changed since this question was written.</p>
<p>In any case, it is unfortunately common for people to upload to Flickr  and similar sites images which they did not create and do not own the rights to, and describe these as &quot;public&quot; or some other permissive tag without proper authority to do so. Any app displaying images obtained from Flickr or any similar sites must have a reasonable process to respond to copyright claims. Proper implementation of the DMCA takedown procedure might suffice. A prominent notice of the available procedure to make copyright claims,  what ever it is, would be a very good idea.</p>
