When in doubt, start with the law. In this case, that would be According to Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92, starting with Chapter 1, Section 107, which you can view here. The gist of the matter is that portions of copyrighted works can be legally reproduced in several cases:
- If someone wishes to discuss or criticize some portion of the work, it is legal to reproduce portions of it so long as they are properly credited.
- Education workers tend to have fairly wide discretion to create and distribute copies of copyrighted materials for educational purposes.
- The amount of material reproduced and the profit/non-profit status of the entity doing the reproducing are taken into account.
What is creative commons licensing?
Per the official website for Creative Commons Licensing (CCL), CCL is an attempt to find a happy medium between full-fledged copyright protection (all rights are reserved by the creator) and public domain (the creator retains no protection against any other party making use of his creation for any and all purposes). For works protected by a CCL agreement, the creator retains the same rights that he would have for his works under copyright law, but he can specify accepted uses for his creation which are looser applications of normal copyright law. For example, an artist may specify that it is acceptable for anyone to use images from his web site on for-profit web sites as long as the image is credited to him. Some specific variants are discussed here.
In my Links section, you will find a number of interesting sites containing CCL or public domain images.
1 comment:
You are right. That is what I did. If you don't know that read what the law states.
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