Image licensing

The short version

If you did not create the image and it is not licensed to you, ask before you use it. Which party you ask depends on where the image came from, and the section below explains how to tell.

Where the images come from

Three categories cover essentially everything on this site, and the caption tells you which one you are looking at.

Manufacturer, vendor, and source-site images. Product photography, screenshots of software interfaces, and diagrams published by the company that makes the thing. Copyright stays with that company. Our use is editorial — illustrating an article about the product. That does not license it onward to you, and we cannot grant rights we do not hold. Go to the rights holder named in the caption.

Stock and openly-licensed photography. Images from services such as Unsplash and Pexels, or files carrying a Creative Commons deed. The license that governs your reuse is the one attached to the file at its source, not anything on this site. Most permit reuse under conditions — attribution, non-commercial limits, share-alike — and those conditions bind you exactly as they bind us. Read the deed at the source before reusing.

Publication-owned images. The site logo, the wordmark, and any chart or graphic made here. SXM Wire owns those outright. Use the contact form on this site when it is available, or reach the publisher through the domain WHOIS for sxmwire.com.

What you may do without asking

• Link to any article on this site, including deep links to a specific section.
• Quote a short excerpt of the text with clear credit and a link back.
• View the thumbnail previews search engines generate, as those engines' own terms allow.

What you may not do

• Copy a photograph into another website, application, slide deck, video, newsletter, or advertisement without permission from the rights holder.
• Strip, crop out, or obscure a credit.
• Present a vendor screenshot, a stock photograph, or our own graphic as your original work.
• Hotlink our image files, which serves your traffic from our bandwidth and breaks the moment a file moves.
• Use any image here to imply that SXM Wire, or a company depicted, endorses your product.

How to request a license

1. Note the article URL and either the image filename or the exact caption text.
2. Read the credit in the caption — it names the rights holder.
3. Vendor or stock image: contact that rights holder. We cannot sublicense their work, and asking us only adds a step.
4. Publication-owned image: use the contact page with the intended use, where it will appear, and for how long. Editorial and educational requests are usually straightforward.

Our own standard for using images

The rules we apply to ourselves, since they explain why the images here look the way they do:

• A photograph must depict its actual subject. Generic imagery that merely gestures at a topic is not used. An article about a specific device shows that device.
• No photograph is reused across two articles on this site. A recycled lead image is a signal that a page had nothing specific behind it.
• Credit lives in the caption; the alt text describes the picture. They do different jobs — alt text serves a reader who cannot see the image, credit serves the person who made it. Neither substitutes for the other.
• Empty beats wrong. If no image genuinely depicts the subject, the article runs without one.

Why this page is specific rather than boilerplate

Most sites publish an images page that says everything is copyright the publisher and stops. On a publication that runs vendor photography, screenshots, and reference imagery alongside its own work, that statement would be false, and a false rights notice is worse than none — it misleads the reader about what they may reuse, and it quietly claims other people's work.

So this page separates the categories, because the answer genuinely differs between them.

Publication-owned material

Original diagrams, charts, and layouts produced for this site belong to the publication. Reuse beyond quotation for commentary or review needs permission, which is usually given for non-commercial and educational use if you ask and credit properly.

Article text is covered by the same principle. Quoting a passage with attribution and a link is welcome. Reproducing a page in full, or running it through a rewriting tool and publishing the result, is not — and the second is not made acceptable by the paraphrase.

Vendor and manufacturer imagery

Product photography supplied by manufacturers, press images, and marketing renders belong to the companies that produced them. They appear here under the terms those companies publish for editorial use, and those terms cover our use, not yours.

If you want to use a vendor image, go to the vendor. Almost every company of any size maintains a press or brand resource with images and explicit terms attached. That takes ten minutes and gives you something you can rely on, which copying from here does not.

Third-party and reference imagery

Some images come from open-license repositories, and those carry the license and attribution the original file requires — most commonly a Creative Commons license naming the creator and the license version. Where that is the case, the caption names the source, and the license travels with the file: your reuse is governed by the original terms, not by anything on this page.

Attribution requirements under those licenses are not optional, and stripping a credit is a license violation regardless of where you found the file.

How to credit this site

If you are quoting or referencing an article, the credit that helps a reader is the publication name, the article title, and a link to the article. That is all we ask for text.

For a publication-owned image licensed to you, the caption should name SXM Wire and, where the format allows it, link to the article the image came from.

Do not credit us for an image we did not create. If the caption on our page names a vendor or a photographer, that is who the credit belongs to — passing it to us is inaccurate, and it deprives the person who actually made the image.

Screenshots of software and interfaces

Screenshots are a category worth separating out, because their status is frequently misunderstood.

A screenshot of a software interface is not automatically free to use. The interface, its icons, its typography, and any content displayed in it may each be protected, and the vendor's own brand guidelines often set explicit terms for reproduction. Our use of a screenshot is editorial: illustrating an article that discusses the software. That basis does not transfer to you, and it does not extend to using the same screenshot in marketing material, a product page, or a training deck.

If you need a screenshot of a vendor's product, the vendor's press or brand kit is the right place to start. Most publish one, and the images there come with terms attached that you can actually rely on.

Alt text and captions

Two things sit under every figure here and they do different jobs.

Alt text describes what the picture shows, for a reader using a screen reader or on a connection where the image never arrives. It is written for that reader, not for a search engine, and it describes the image rather than repeating the headline.

The caption carries the credit and the context: who made the image, and what the reader should notice in it.

Neither substitutes for the other. Stuffing a credit into alt text leaves a screen-reader user with a copyright notice instead of a description, and moving the description into the caption leaves them with nothing at all.

Automated collection and model training

Images on this site are published to illustrate articles for people reading them. Collecting them in bulk for redistribution, for building a dataset, or for training a model is not a use we grant, and for most of the files here it is not a use we could grant even if we wanted to — the rights belong to the vendors and photographers named in the captions.

Where a rights holder has separately licensed their work for such use, that license governs their file. Nothing on this page extends it.

Fair use, fair dealing, and similar exceptions

Nothing here is intended to override rights you already have under the law where you live. Quotation, criticism, review, news reporting, and teaching exceptions exist, they vary substantially between jurisdictions, and they apply to our use of others' work as much as to your use of ours.

What those exceptions do not do is turn "I found it online" into permission. Where the intended use is commercial, substantial, or a substitute for licensing the original, the exception is unlikely to help, and asking the rights holder is faster than finding out the hard way.

Takedown requests

If you hold rights to an image published here and believe it was used without adequate basis, write to us with the article URL, the image, and your relationship to the work. Requests of this kind are treated as urgent and handled ahead of other correspondence. Use the contact form on this site when it is available, or reach the publisher through the domain WHOIS for sxmwire.com.

See also: Editorial policy, Terms of use, Contact.