Free Clipart, Photo Websites & Copyright Issues
Photo courtesy of morgueFile.com
Teachers and writers are always on the hunt for appropriate images to enhance their instruction or articles. Clearly, the Internet has simplified this process tremendously, but at the same time the legal issues surrounding copyright and fair use have become more complicated.
Yvon Prehn over at Effective Church Communications provides a free webinar on sites that provide free clipart and stock photography. She also highlights issues surrounding copyright and provides some good links to help you use many of the resources on the Internet and still stay within the law.
Watch the free webinar and make sure to download the companion handouts with links to all of the sites Yvon references during her presentation. The webinar is less than 30 minutes long and worth your time.
NOTE: the image above is a free photo compliments of morgueFile.com. I learned about morgueFile.com while participating in Yvon’s webinar.
Protecting Your Own Material
Perhaps you are on the other side of the issue, and you are concerned about protecting your own material on the web. As Yvon points out during her webinar, you do not need to do anything to copyright your intellectual property. Simply creating it and printing it or posting it on the Internet will qualify it as copyright protected.
Still, holding the copyright to your latest masterpiece and protecting your intellectual property online are two different matters. Michael Hyatt provides eight ways you can protect your copyrighted material in today’s copy & paste world. These include:
- Understand copyright law
- Publish an official copyright notice
- Create an explicit permission policy
- Give the benefit of the doubt
- Request that they remove your post
- Demand that they take down your content
- Notify the infringer’s hosting service
- Hire an attorney and take action
What sources to you use for clipart and images (free or paid)?