This is a true story.
Three years ago, an eleven-year-old blogger here on Edublogs wrote a post about his favorite lunch food – salami.
As part of his post, he used Google Images to find a quick photo of salami that he then uploaded to his blog.
Fast forward to now.
Our Edublogs support team just received a lengthy cease and desist letter from a large law firm that represents the photographer of the salami photo. The formal letter describes all sorts of legal problems for Edublogs and the author of the blog should we not immediately remove the photo in question.
We get these letters daily, but what stood out about this one is that the photo was several years old and not particularly interesting or unique. Most of the complaints we get come from the use of things like maps and curriculum documents.
This tasty looking photo looked a lot like this one:
*For the record, we have permission to share this photo from a stock image site that we pay for.
What does this mean for teachers and students?
It is important to know that even the most innocent of actions can lead to bigger problems down the road.
Using Google Images or copying a photo from most websites is much like plagiarism. Hopefully, by educating each other, we can avoid mistakes like this one and promote fair use of photos and other media on the web.
If you are looking to learn more about copyright, creative commons, and where to find images you can actually use, check out this recent Teacher Challenge post here.
At any rate, we thought this might be a funny example to share.
P.S. When researching for this post, I discovered that when you search for ‘Edublogs Salami’ on Google, you get over 42,000 results. What are our users writing about!? :)
Happy blogging!
So remove the image. There is an acceptable and fair use policy that does apply to the educational setting. I’m not saying it’s right to not give credit to images, but comply with the request and be done with it.
Hi Mark, that is exactly what we did – as we do constantly every day. Our point here was to provide a somewhat humorous example to educate our users not to use images they shouldn’t.
It’s crazy to me how anal some artists can be about their pictures when it comes to education, especially something as silly as a piece of salami which is very vague. But to the victor their spoils, so like mark said just take it down. In the future just remind your bloggers to google advance search and select to search/view images that only are approved by the artist to be used, might bring up less results but you won’t run into these problems anymore.
Google Images can be searched by license for creative commons in the advanced search Google Images search. Note the usage rights field> http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search
Even easier is the field to limit to creative commons licensed materials in flickr. As a photographer/artist/librarian, I do understand both sides of this issue. ;-)
(Of course, to muddle everything there is that fairuse thing too)…
Hi Robin, it is great that Google images has now included search by license for Creative Commons in their advanced search. Trouble is often teachers don’t realise they need to do this and don’t teach their students about copyright and Creative Commons.
Often Fair Use can be the issue because they assume it applies to the Internet which it doesn’t. Ronnie has discussed it here – http://theedublogger.com/2012/02/09/the-educators-guide-to-copyright-fair-use-and-creative-commons/
All companies are faced with the same issue we have. If we receive a DMCA ( Digital Millennium Copyright Act ) or breach of copyright notification we’re immediately required to remove the content and we can’t argue Fair Use.
When uploading an image to an edublogs blog, is there an option on the upload page to credit the author/source? I know some people manage to put this under the image and others put any credits at the end on the post.
Hi Teresa,
A common option if you want to credit the Author and source is to add it to the Caption area of the photo before inserting. The Guide written by Kathleen Morris in this post shows you how to do it – http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/2012/08/20/activity-7-fair-use-copyright-and-introduction-to-using-images/
The other way educators do it is using embed code. Some of the Creative Commons Image search tools include embed code you can use that adds the credits with the photo.
Hi Ronnie,
Folk interested in a range of Creative Commons based search engines, a couple with the added benefit of generating code with the required attributions, you might like to look at https://sites.google.com/site/mrpbps01/image-search-engines .
Hi John
Thanks for the link and I’ll add it to my post – http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/2012/08/20/activity-7-fair-use-copyright-and-introduction-to-using-images/
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Great – and funny – example to focus awareness on the consequences of plagiarism. Google images are so easy and tempting… Collaborate with your yearbook adviser, if you have one. Borrow a digital camera and have students make their own images!
You are so right about Google Images. It’s hard to teach (and model) that just because something can be obtained “for free” does not make it free for the taking.
I’ve seen lots of licensing issues like this come up. I think a lot of people are just not educated on the (often-tricky) legal minefield of photo licensing and copyright law. And I don’t blame them – I also get tripped up on the nuances and I’ve been dealing with it / reading up on it for years.
This is one of the reasons I created http://photopin.com – to make it easy to find creative commons licensed Flickr photos – geared specifically towards bloggers – with attribution text / link markup included (especially easy now that the most current version of WordPress allows html embedding into the caption field).