What’s the deal with copyright photos?

..or: “learning to love the Creative Commons license“.

Photos can be so useful in class – images get people talking and writing, and can help to find common ground quickly.

These days, teachers are expected to reference and cite every image, especially if used in an assessment task.

However, photos on the internet are copyright the photographer – unless otherwise marked. Probably.

To use an image legally, you either need to

get permission from the photographer or author (if “All Rights Reserved”), or
find an image that is licensed under “Creative Commons“(you must credit the author), or
find an image that is in the Public Domain (totally free, no need to cite source – usually very old works)
find images from a place like Morgue File, where photographers have donated photos from previous projects (copyright-free!!).

You can search several places for creative commons licensed images: for example:

flickr direct search
flickr advanced search (tick the creative commons box)
google now has Search Tools > Usage Rights (used to be advanced search)
a site called Compfight (my favourite) – (I have a video screencast on this)
a new site called Photos for Class, which adds the author’s details in a watermark!!

Google image search has Usage Rights in the Search Tools.

ANY QUESTIONS?

Use the comment form below or send me a message if you know my PRACE email.

[If not concerned about legality, don’t worry about any of this.]

..and when you have a photo with permission (via creative commons), then yes credit the author with her name and the photo URL, for example:

At flickr for example, you can see license down below the image.

Flickr shows you the license on each photo, and gives a short URL for sharing credit.

electro-textual