In this article,  an artist was found to have been making digital paintings based off of photography she was not given permission to use. While it is easy to see this and think she should have known better or that it was malicious, there is one quote in the article that I found that sum up my experience learning about copyright. “In two cases, she found nature photos online that were unattributed and used them.” Judging this artist is easy, but most people are not taught the importance of copyright and fair use and this leaves them stranded without help in a deeply confusing topic. The reason I bolded that quote is because I have found numerous pictures online that were even marked as something I could use under creative commons licencing, they were clearly photos I had no legal ability to use. For example, in one of my other classes, I was working on an assignment about using films in the classroom.  While preparing my presentation for my assignment I wanted a photo that represented a film for my example and went looking on creative commons where I found this. Initially, I was excited, it was licensed for me to use and remix it under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license. However, after finding out it was posted on Flickr I took a better look at it and it was clearly just an official Marvel-made poster that this person posted without changing the attribution rights (which led me to briefly believe it was fan-made). Remixing and sharing this publically would have been illegal but according to the website I got it off of it would have looked perfectly legal to a user. This block of text is meant to show an example of how complicated this area can be and I am no expert myself.

Now to share some of the resources I have found or been given along the way that have helped me use and source materials in a legal and ethical way.

Youtube Audio Library: The YouTube Audio Library has been extremely useful in finding background music for the numerous amounts of videos I have had to make during the semester

Unsplash: This website has been very helpful in finding images that can be used for any of my projects

Creative Commons Image Search: Pulling from numerous resources, Creative Commons is easily the most plentiful way to find images that can be legally shared.

It is also important to understand the different CC licences and how to attribute them. Continue reading