| September 2007 | Vol. 12 Issue 3 |
Copy, paste, and post it on the Web?
Not so fast. It’s a copyright violation if the work you post is not yours and you didn’t get permission to use it.
From time to time, people ask AgComm specialists if it is OK to use someone else’s photograph or graphic image and put it on their Web site without getting the original owner’s permission. Those who want to post the images believe it is acceptable because they work at a university and the owner of the image works at a university (theirs or another).
The answer, however, is that it is not OK — not until written permission has been granted to post the photo, image, table, or graphic on a Web site. If a person does not get permission to post an image, then that person and the university could be sued.
Perhaps the person posting the image placed a photo credit beside the image and believe it will be acceptable to use the photo if they give the individual credit. Not so fast. You still must get written permission.
First of all, it’s a copyright violation to take someone’s work without getting permission, whether it’s for the Web or for a publication. A copyright, very simply, is intellectual property. It protects the creator. The notes you take in a meeting are automatically copyrighted without ever filling out the paperwork. Your doodling is your original work of art and is automatically copyrighted. Your vacation photos are copyrighted the minute you snap the pictures.
Images placed on the Web have a life of their own, even after they’ve been deleted. Virginia Quesada, AgComm Web writer, says search engines may have your page in their cache, so anything you think you’ve deleted may not be deleted everywhere and may show up later. People archive pages and may not update your new page, and you have no idea who has your page. Even if you submit a “delete request” to all of the search engines, there is no guarantee that the image will be deleted everywhere.
To complicate the matter, an Internet archive called Wayback Machine has captured billions of pages from around the world to create an Internet history and show how pages are evolving. Scanned signatures, for example, may still be located by going to Wayback Machine. Some people incorrectly believe they can get around that by putting meta tags in the header that tells a spider or robot, “noindex,” “noarchive,” and “nofollow.” Still, there is considerable inconsistency in the way the major search engines deal with meta tags, so the tags may not work in every case.
Remember, by putting something on the Web, you are distributing it — worldwide. Copyright law protects the original author, so get permission before you copy, paste, and post. Always get the permission in writing.
This discussion of copyrights to be continued in future issues.
Jane Wolf Brown, brownjw@purdue.edu
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