Copyright

It is important to address issues of copyright for your classroom, both for yourself as a teacher and for your students.  There are many sites which share images and sound for others to use. There are still guidelines which must be followed to use them without infringing on the rights of others.

Anything taken from the Internet (text, images, sound, video...)  whether for use in a paper publication or for publication on the Internet must comply with Canadian copyright laws. For detailed information consult Internet and the Law.

When you use materials created by someone else most licenses or copyright restrictions demand that you:

• Give attribution - give credit to the person who created the material
• Provide a link to the site it came from
• Include information about the use (e.g. the Creative Commons license)

If the material does not have a creative commons license, you must check the site for information about how the material may be used or contact the site owner for permission.

A properly cited image may look like this.


Creative Commons
When you see an image on the internet, it is protected by copyright. However, some images use a creative commons license. To see how the different licenses are understood in Canada, click here.
The advantage of a creative commons license is that you do not have to contact the creator in order to use his/her work. The license already grants permission and the level of license specifies the way in which it may be used.

There are different levels of licenses that work with any combination of the qualities below.

• Attribution - you must give credit to the person who created the material
• Non-commercial - cannot be used for anything commercial, from advertising to reselling
• Share-alike - if you use someone's work and alter it, you may only use that work under the same licensing level as the original work held
• Non-derivative - you are not allowed to alter the work in any way

You can learn more about Creative Commons by

• watching these videos at Revver
  
• reading Creative Commons in K-12 Education from the Spiral Notebook - Edutopia
• read about licensing for creators in Canada here.

For repositories of images and sound click here.

Other Sources of Copyright Free Media

Flickr

Flickr is a photo-sharing web site. People tag photos with key words. This is a great source of images that can be used in the classroom. Many people put Creative Commons licenses on their images which makes it easy to use them legally in documents and on the Internet. To search for images that have creative commons licenses go to: http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/  Then click on Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content. You may refine the search further by clicking on one of the options below it. Then you will be sure to retrieve images that are already licensed for use.

Responsible teachers will use their judgement as to whether the image has been created by the person who uploaded it. For example: a map was probably created by someone else.