Week 1 Thing 3

My knowledge of copyright pretty much consisted of citing work that wasn’t mine in a research paper and attaching a bibliography. Who knew it was so complicated and who knew there were so many people reusing someone else’s work and not giving credit where credit is due. With all the variety in sources today I can see how copyrighting can be a little fuzzy. For example, I was under the impression that images I found on Google were up for grabs, unless they had “copyright” written across the picture so that you couldn’t use it anyway. I decided to test this theory. When I got onto Google I conducted an image search for recycling. Right away 24,000,000 images popped up. When I realized I could change the usage rights, I was amazed at what I found. When my search was refined to “images labeled for reuse” I was given only 393 out of the original 24,000,000 and when I refined it to “images labeled for commercial reuse” the number of images shrunk to 269. I prided myself on being a model citizen, but who knows how many times I have broken the law all because I had to have the perfect picture on my newsletter! Ha! Ha! In all seriousness, this needs to be brought to the attention of our students. My class is starting a research project this week and when they are searching for pictures to display on their projects I will be talking about the usage rights.