How To Get Images From the Internet and Not Get In Trouble?

This week I discovered a way to borrow and use images from the Internet and not get in trouble for it. Normally, for my students, it is hard to take your own pictures for every project that they make, and we end up searching the Internet and using pictures that we do not have a right or permission to use. Gladly, because it is for education purposes, we are protected under the fair use doctrine (a set of factors and considerations, or exceptions to the copyright law, that help us figure out which things we can do without permission).

But this week, in one of my assignments for a class at the university, we were introduced to Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org), an organization which has made available six licenses that allow the authors to specify the rights they wave or reserve for their digital products. These rights are:



Attribution: Which requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product.




Attribution-NoDebris: Requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product but they cannot change or derive other work from the original image or product.




Attribution-Noncommercial:  Requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product but can only be used for noncommercial purposes.



Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike:  Requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product but the work can only be used for noncommercial purposes and resulting works have to have the same license as the original work.



Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDevris:  Requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product but can only be used for noncommercial purposes and they can use it as long as they do not change or derive other work from the original image or product.



Attribution-ShareAlike: Which requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product and the resulting works have to have the same license as the original work.

For more information on Creative Commons see this video:

So now you may be asking yourselves, how do we find images on the Internet that have a Creative Commons license?

There is a really easy way, that probably most of us have used but that we haven't (at least I hadn't) noticed the Creative Commons licensing information. That easy way is using Flickr (http://www.flickr.com). Next time you search for images, once you select an image to go to its 'page', look on the bottom right hand side of the information displayed, and under 'Owner settings' you will see if the photo has creative commons license and what are you able to do with that digital work.

  

To show you an example, I created a SlideShow in Flickr, using images with Creative Commons licenses. If you go to the image details, under the description of the pictures you can read what type of Creative Commons license each had and the original source and author of each image. You can see the images here or see the slide show below.

Marco Cesar Saenz
Using Web Tools in the Classroom