I don't believe that copyright requires the owner to have made a good effort to protect their works (while trademarks do) but there's no watermark, no owner or copyright information in the Exif data, and the site it's hosted on is dead.
That doesn't make it a public domain image, and a respectable publication would not be using it, but there's no easy way to find the source or license the image.
If you're wanting to make money off this or license it out freely with attribution, you should make that clear. There's an entire industry built around this sort of thing.
Even something like hosting it on a free Flickr account would probably work if you're just wanting attribution. Check their T&Cs first though, some photo hosting sites require that you hand them all rights to the image.
Finding the photographer and context of every photo of a person of significance you might use in an article seems like a logistical nightmare when there are no watermarks on it.
They shouldn't be publishing images that they don't have the rights for. If it can't be sourced, they shouldn't use it.
Isn't this the reason why goggle lost the view image link?
Getty Images basically wanted to drive people to their own site to license images, rather than having people browse Google Images and find an alternative elsewhere.
It sucks that they managed to force Google to basically kill the utility of Images, as there are so many sites which are still hosting images but the page they were hosted on is no longer accessible, and there's no way of getting a source link any more.
The extensions I've tried only click through to the "big" image that is loaded when you click on an image, which is
sometimes the full resolution original but many times it is not.
Isn't that a type of theft?
Theft deprives the owner of the original item. Making a copy does not.
The photographer owns the photograph, not the subject.
Ideally the subject would be signing a waiver if it's being used for commercial purposes, but I don't think it's required.
