How 2 understand Creative Commons Licensing

Teachers spend a lot of time and energy worrying about plagiarism of the written word. Schools invest money in services like turnitin.com, sentenceworks.com and other services that scan written documents for plagiarism.

But what about visual plagiarism?

What do you do when you need a picture of some thing? Probably google the keywords, click on "images" and download the best thing that pops up. But did you ever notice the little warning that "this image might be subject to copywright"? Maybe you noticed, but do you know what it means?

What it means is that you've probably broken the law by using pictures you didn't have the right to use. It probably also means that your students have done the same thing.

SO WHAT DO I DO ABOUT IT???

The easiest thing to do is do your search through the creative commons service, which was created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Creative Commons is a way for normal people to lay claim to things they have created, and to specify how others are allowed to use it (I'll blog a lot more about this later - for now, here's a quick youtube video about it)

The search website is here and this is what it looks like:



When you type in your keyword(s) - notice the two checkboxes where you can tell the search engine what you want to be able to do with the image - checking both will get you the images that have the most permissive rights.

Then you check each tab to see what people have put out there - these are the things that are OK to use.