• According to Hawkins (2011), Copyright laws were established not to give the author the right to deny their work to other people, but instead to encourage its creation.
Article I, Section 8, clause 8, of the United States Constitution states the purpose of copyright laws is “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
• The copyright owner has the right to do four things(called exclusive rights):
Reproduce the copyrighted work;
Display the copyrighted work publicly;
Prepare derivative works based on the copyrighted work; and
Distribute copies of the copyrighted work to the public by sale, rental or lending, and/or to display the image.
Source: 17 USC Section 106.
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5 Things to think about before using Copyrighted Images
(Inspired by Sara Hawkins, November 23, 2011)
❶ Understand the term "fair use". Just because you provide attribution and/or a link back to the original doesn’t mean you’re free and clear. Fair use has nothing to do with attribution. That’s an issue related to plagiarism, which is different from copyright.
Fair use basically means you’re allowed to infringe on someone’s copyright and they can’t do anything about it. If your use is covered by fair use, you don’t have to provide attribution anyway (although it would be nice).
❷ Why are you using the image? If it is for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (making multiple copies to hand out to a class), scholarship or research then there is no problem.
If you are only using it to pretty a post, you have to consider using a stock image or asking permission.
❸ Have you transformed the image? If the new work which incorporates the copyrighted image is a “transformative work”—what you created no longer resembles the original—there is a greater likelihood of finding an exception to copyright infringement.
Are you taking an image and incorporating it into an infographic? Is the image now part of a video used for one of the reasons set forth in the Copyright Act?
❹ How much of the image are you using? If you’re using a thumbnail and linking to the original location, there is greater likelihood of finding fair use than if you just post the original image. If you’re doing a post about facial features and are just using a portion of the face from an image, you stand a better chance of arguing fair use than if you used the entire image.
❺ Are you willing to risk your site being taken down? Getting a cease and desist/bill/DMCA or being sued? The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides very powerful options for a copyright owner to protect his or her works in the digital space. By hitting “publish,” you may be opening a can of worms
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How to ensure that the pictures you are using are okay to use without permission?
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All About Graphics: A Graphic Tutorial
RandomHi! Want to learn the basics of editing graphics? Want to know more of the in depth world of graphic designing? Come on in and learn all that I am able to teach! Please read everything from top to bottom. It is very important that you do so. All gra...
⚜ 1.3 Copyright
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