There are lots of little rules and laws that you and I (mostly I) probably break every day.  Some of them shouldn’t be against the law.  Some of them are broken accidentally.  Few or none of them are laws in the criminal sense.  Here’s a list of 17 ways you might be breaking the law.  In fact, I might have just broken the law by not altering the title of that article enough before throwing up the link to it.  Who knows?

For example, is it kosher that I used a photo I got off the Switched website to promote the awesome article on Switched?  Since I’m hosting it on the Shaktronics bandwidth, and not their bandwidth, and because I properly attributed the image, it should be okay under Fair Use doctrine.  When in doubt, I pillage Wikipedia, where everything is supposedly free for use under the Creative Commons.  Those images are okay to use.  Flickr can also be a great source of photographs for blog posts, website graphics, and the like.

Generally, it boils down to giving proper credit, paying attention to your local laws, and generally not being a jerk.  If you can handle that, you’ll probably be okay in your online adventure.