Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-38613813-20191128164527/@comment-995426-20191129181011

Artists&mdash;even those who may easily consent to their art being widely shared&mdash;tend to dislike the chain of credit being lost entirely. There are options available to you, such as a reverse Google Images search, where you upload an image to the image search engine and it searches for matching or similar images on other websites, some of which may credit the artist.

There's also a question of what constitutes fair use of an image, whether the artist is known or unknown. Wikis like Turtlepedia generally exercise a certain amount of leeway in using images from official sources to illustrate topics. There are also images that are often used in a meme-like fashion as forum reaction images or other culturally-relevant social media activity, especially if it is fairly easy to identify where they came from. But the use of an image of mysterious origins may become more difficult to justify when it is fished out of the digital aether for use as a reference image in fan fiction, because it could be someone else's fan art.

Even if an artist might consent to its use if it were known, there's a certain damaging effect in doing something that perpetuates other people's ignorance of the image's origins. There are appropriate places to post mysterious images, such as in a reverse Google Images search, or on forums that specifically seek to identify their origin or content. To use such images in a context that makes people seriously wonder whether you created them is not really an appropriate place for them.

All this said, I'm generally supportive of openly sharing and referencing media, creating derivative works based on it, turning it into memes, all of that, as a fair cultural activity. It's just, at the very least, in good taste to ensure that all people involved can easily find out where that media comes from, and to not do anything that may misrepresent the origins of that media.