Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week – Copyright for Teachers and Students

About ten days ago I read this article from attorney Sarah F. Hawkins. The article didn’t have much that was new to me, but I am bringing it up because one of the comments posted under the article points to the larger problem of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge of copyright as it pertains to the Internet.

Here’s the beginning of the comment:

I run my own travel consulting page on a large social media platform, I recently used a google image of a hotel. This morning I received an invoice for $3500 because I used this image, I did not know about copyright infringements as it was just an image on google.

That comment reflects the way that a lot of people misinterpret Google Image search. Unless you use the advanced search filter to find only Creative Commons licensed images, most of what you find through Google Images is copyrighted. Google doesn’t host the images or license the images. Google Images is simply a search engine. Giving an image credit to Google Images is not citing the source and even if Google was the source, unless it is labeled as Creative Commons or Public Domain, you can’t use the image without permission. The exception being in the case of fair use. But even then just because you’re using it for an educational setting doesn’t mean it automatically qualifies your use as fair use. I explained this scenario in more detail in this post in 2014.

On a similar note to the Google Images scenario, citing Facebook as the source of an image does not mean that you can use the image without permission. I explained this in more detail in this post.

Resources for teaching Copyright, Creative Commons, and Fair Use.

The following two videos from Common Craft provide excellent overviews of these topics.

For a more in-depth look at copyright for educators, watch Dr. Wesley Fryer’s Slideshare on the topic. Eight years after he released it, it’s still one of the best resources on the topic.

Here are the week’s most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com:
1. Kahoot Launches a New Mobile App – Play Games in Classroom or at Home
2. Copyright Lessons for Students and Teachers
3. A Fun Geography Game for All
4. Ten Great Tools for Telling Stories With Pictures – A PDF Handout
5. Beyond Words – A Library of Congress Lab Experiment
6. Using Augmented Reality to Learn Nouns and Verbs
7. Borrow, Read, and Listen – The Open Library

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Disclosure: I have an in-kind business relationship with Common Craft.