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Thursday, October 6, 2016

Copyrights, Fair Use and Free Image Resources




Hi everybody. Sorry for such a long delay. I'm currently on a short break and classes have been keeping me very busy.

The one thing I have been noticing when teaching digital media and graphic design is how often students grab an image from the internet and instantly incorporate it into their project. We try to discourage this because in the real world this would be considered plagiarism. When you use other peoples work without consent, that can cause serious legal ramifications if you are found out.

The options you have are to consider reading up on Fair Use or to use copyright / clearance free resources. Using images under Fair Use would require that
any use of copyrighted material is done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not be considered an illegal infringement. For more detail on Fair Use check out these two links:
If you can't quantify your usage with the above info you best bet is to just use copyright /
clearance free resources. Below is a collection of good resources to get you started:

Public Domain Images