The rule is simple even if it is unwelcome: online availability does not establish permission to reuse an image, video or song. Check ownership, the licence, public-domain status and any statutory exception before using it.
Fair dealing is narrower than "fair use"
Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957 lists specific exempted acts rather than a broad, flexible test. The main ones are fair dealing with a work for the purposes of private or personal use including research, criticism or review, and reporting of current events, together with a list of other defined situations. Indian law does not have the open-ended American fair use doctrine, so an argument that your use was "transformative" or "only promotional" carries far less weight here.
Note also what the fair dealing limb does not reach. It applies to a work not being a computer programme, so software sits outside it entirely and is governed by its own narrow exceptions covering back-up copies by a lawful possessor, interoperability, and study of how a programme functions. Copying somebody's code is not defensible as fair dealing in the way quoting a paragraph of their article might be.
"I gave credit, so it is fine." Attribution is not a licence. Crediting the photographer establishes that you knew who owned it.
"It was on Google Images, so it is public domain." Google is a search index, not a rights clearing house. Public domain means the term of copyright has expired, which for most works is the author's life plus 60 years.
Music on reels and videos
A song involves several separate rights: the literary work in the lyrics, the musical work in the composition, and the sound recording. Using a popular track on a business reel needs clearance, and platform music libraries are licensed for personal use in ways that frequently exclude commercial and branded content. Read the platform's own terms; the licence you have as a personal user is not the licence a business needs.
Because those rights can sit with different owners, clearing one of them is not clearing the song. A licence from a label covers the recording; it does not by itself cover the underlying composition or the lyrics, which may be administered by a publisher or a copyright society. Our note on who owns a Bollywood song traces where each right typically sits and who has to sign.
Faces and voices are a separate question
Copyright is not the only right engaged when you reuse material about a person. Using someone's face, voice or likeness in promotional material, or generating a synthetic version of it, raises personality and privacy rights that are independent of who owns the photograph or the clip. Clearing the copyright in an image does not clear the right of the person in it, and a licence from a stock library is not consent from the model unless the release says so. Our note on personality rights and AI deepfakes in India covers where those lines are now being drawn.
- Your own photograph, or one taken by someone who has assigned the rights to you
- A stock licence, with the licence number and permitted use recorded
- A Creative Commons licence, complied with exactly, including attribution
- Public domain, verified rather than assumed
- Written permission from the copyright owner, kept on file
- Separate consent from any identifiable person shown, which is a different right
- A record of where each image came from, so the question can be answered years later
How to use images safely
- Buy a stock licence and keep the receipt and licence terms on file
- Use genuinely free-licence sources, and check the specific Creative Commons terms, since some require attribution and some prohibit commercial use or derivatives
- Commission your own photography, with a written assignment
- Keep a record of the source and licence for every asset. When a demand notice arrives two years later, that file is your entire defence
If you receive a demand
These are commonly sent by agencies on behalf of photographers and the amounts claimed are often inflated. Do not ignore it and do not simply pay. Take down the image, establish what the actual licence would have cost, verify that the sender genuinely holds the rights, and respond. Most resolve at a fraction of the sum first demanded.
Ask the sender to prove the chain: who the author was, how the claimant acquired the rights, and on what basis it demands on the author's behalf. Ask for the licence schedule that produces the figure claimed. Keep the correspondence factual, and do not admit a period of use longer than your own records verify.
It is worth understanding what the other side has. Civilly, the owner can seek an injunction, damages or an account of profits, and delivery-up, and may sue in the district court where the plaintiff resides or carries on business, so a demand from another city can become litigation close to the claimant rather than to you. Criminally, knowing infringement is punishable with imprisonment of not less than six months, extending to three years, and a fine of not less than Rs 50,000, extending to Rs 2 lakh, with a discretion to go lower where the infringement was not for gain in the course of trade. Our note on copyright infringement remedies in India sets out both tracks.
If you are on the other side of this and want material taken down, one provision is directly useful. Where a person is storing a work only transiently or incidentally in order to provide links or access to it, and you send a written complaint that the storage infringes, that person must stop facilitating access for twenty-one days or until a court order, and if no order arrives within that period access may resume. So the written complaint buys you a defined window in which to move for an injunction, and it is wasted if you do not use it. Having a registration certificate makes that letter considerably harder to ignore, which our guide to copyright registration in India explains.