up to now, i never bothered much about how to deal with the legal status of the content of my website. of course, i‘m aware of the fact that there is something like copyright law and i usually tried to refer properly to the used sources like song lyrics etc. (the way a junior scientist like me should do it).
concerning the integrated photos, this topic becomes more difficult: most of the pictures used have been taken by myself, but from time to time a much faster way to obtain a appropriate picture is to perform a image search on google and suddenly you‘re close to copyright violation.
then i got in contact with the creative commons licencing organisation. with this you can clarify the criteria how own „products“ can be used in a reasonable way. such a licence opens a way to make the content partly open but setting clear condtitions for that.
this method offers me the possibility to include content from other sources (like the picture above), which shows the advantages of a creative connected world…
key to the open door picture by tawheed manzoor [cc-by]
[edited 2014-10-02: clarified that my own works are not available with by-nc-nd by default, unless otherwise stated]