Hi,Can I use advertisement photo from the magazine in my website? for example: gucci perfume advertisement on Vogue, can I embed that photo on my website? Thanks.
Typically, no. The photo is copyrighted, and posting on your website violates that copyright. The only exception is if you can show that you copied it in order to genuinely comment on it, and that copying it for that commentary was a reasonable thing to do. If so, you might qualify under the "fair use" defense to copyright infringement. That said, probably not a good idea to go down that path. Most magazines have groups that now watch for this sort of thing, send threatening letters, and so on. The aggravation will be costly even if you end up being right.
Hope that helps. Good luck.
I don't understand why they want to stop this. I help them promote the products. The purpose for using that is those photos are usually beautiful and I want to decorate my website. Is it still a serious "No"?
Enforcement of copyright is not perfect, so there will always be websites that use images without permission. That said, the copyright holders are being increasingly vigilant, and you don't want to be the person who gets caught. You can run Google searches for bloggers writing about all this -- how they get a letter with a demand for several thousand dollars and then have to either pay or hire lawyers. Not worth it.
To your question, it's true that your site might be good for them. But they want you to ask permission first. (Look at Vogue and see if they have a permissions department, or call customer service and ask about it.)
So you suggest the best way is to figure out who the owner is and ask for permission? For the Gucci perfume example, the owner might be Gucci not Vogue, so I need to ask them first.
I agree that Vogue might not have the rights it needs to authorize this, but they might, and they might also be able to connect you to the entity that does.
The worst case is money and removal, yes. The normal ask for something like this would be $750-$3k in damages, depending on how aggressive they want to be.
Pinterest is different, as it does not by itself choose the clips. It acts as a pipe -- its customers choose the clips. That changes the liability rules. If you have no involvement in picking the clips, and you only post things that your users suggest, you can avoid liability so long as you comply with something called the DMCA. (You can Google for it and read about the details, but you have to have an easy way for copyright holders to notify you about infringement, and you have to act on those notifications.)
Hope that helps.
Experience: Professor of Law at Top-Tier Law School, specializing in patent & copyright