I would like to thank all the graphic artists who do a lot of work to brighten up my websites and those of other people. Many graphics which can be seen on my websites are available free of charge. I mention this to make clear how beautiful a website can look without having money spent on it. All you have to do is to place a link on the respective page which leads to the artist's website.
Now some people might think that the whole web world would be grateful to these artists that they offer their works so generously. Unfortunately it is not like that. I have to admit that I, too, in the beginning of my time as a webmaster had graphics on my website from so-called "public domain collections" - simply due to lack of knowledge and without thinking about it. The copyright problem came to my attention later by a website which contained several copyright logos with the links. Of course I soon learned about it and with a heavy heart I replaced some of my former favourite graphics by others from original websites. I'm sure there are many unexperienced webmasters who have to learn about these things - which is not a problem as long as they are willing to learn.
There are many webmasters, however, who know very well that they are doing something wrong when they use graphics without giving credit to the artist, when they add them to their collections or link directly to the graphics, so that bandwidth is being stolen from the original sites. Anyway, they don't care about this. Some artists are even exposed to insults, for example because they created certain graphics only for their own websites or because they do not offer enough free graphics in some people's opinion. Probably all this sounds unbelievable to decent people - but unfortunately this is reality!
So when you choose graphics or pictures for your website you should take care that you download them from original websites and not from collections. Also one should become familiar with the terms of use which are similar to each other, but are not always the same, especially when it comes to the use of graphics on commercial websites or in emails. Thirdly one should never link directly to a graphic, but always load it on one's *own* website server.
If all webmasters obeyed these rules, there wouldn't be so many closed graphic websites!