Copyright, licensing and attribution
A quick guide for Digital Society students
Copyright — certain rights given to the creator of an original work — is an important topic when it comes to the internet and society. As a Digital Society student, you will publish your assessed work online, so you will need to have an understanding of this topic.
Copyright and your work
When you write an essay, or an assessed blog post, who owns the copyright?
The Copyright Guidance Service at Manchester has created a guide below to answer this and other questions. Have a look at ‘Copyright basics’ below, then the ‘Copyright and students’ tab. Try to find the answer to the above question.
Licenses
Licenses allow you as a copyright holder to choose how your work is used. ‘All rights reserved’ is a very closed license, whereas a Creative Commons CC 0 licence is effectively ‘No rights reserved’ and very open. Public Domain material is also completely open and free to use, however rather than having been licensed by the rights holder, this material is normally available because the copyright has either expired, has been waived, or is simply inapplicable.
Between ‘All rights reserved’ and ‘No rights reserved’, there are a huge range of reusable licenses, including other Creative Commons licenses for creative works. Have you ever licensed anything (academic or otherwise), or thought about it?
Finding free images
Here we don’t just mean ‘free’ as in ‘no cost’, but ‘free’ as in ‘you are free to use this under certain conditions, without violating copyright’.
Below is a selection of sites which may help you find images which you can use in your work, even if it is public. Thanks to Neil Sprunt from the Library for this list.
- Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language.
- Everystockphoto is an image search engine allowing access to photos from many sources. Currently they index and search millions of freely licensed photos, from various sources and present them in an integrated search. Consequently terms vary. Click on the licence icon (below and to the left of every image) for further information.
- Flickr (Creative Commons) Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license. Also see Blue Mountain andCompfight.
- Photofunia is the best way to add a spark to your photos, make them special and more original. In only a few seconds an amazing photo collage is ready, absolutely free.
- TinEye Labs search for Creative Commons images by colour.
- FreeFoto.com claims to be “the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet”. Educational users must acknowledge the source. Creative Commons licence applies.
- Free Images — Stock.xchng is a stock library which hosts around 400,000 photos. See under “availability” for terms of use.
- MorgueFile contains free high resolution digital stock photographs and reference images for either corporate or public use. The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for illustrators, comic book artist, designers, teachers and all creative pursuits.
- Public Domain Pictures is a repository for free public domain images. Download high quality HD photos or upload your own.
- Image*After is a large online free photo collection. You can download and use any image or texture from our site and use it in your own work, either personal or commercial.
- WorldImages The internationally recognized WorldImages database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It contains almost 75,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. WorldImages is accessible anywhere and its images may be freely used for non-profit educational purposes.
- Openphoto is a niche photo sharing platform created in 1998 by michael jastremski. Their primary audience are artists, developers, teachers and students . OpenPhoto contributors offer their images for free under terms of Creative Commons licensing.
Attribution
You should always reference ideas and text which you use in your work, however, you may be less familiar with attributing images. If your coursework is not shared outside of the University, you can take advantage of educational fair use rules.
However, for this course unit, you will publish your work online, which will help you to develop digital communication skills which will be more useful in the ‘outside world’. You must therefore ensure that you are free to use any images included in your Medium posts and Pecha Kucha presentation, and state — as a minimum — the license (e.g. CC-BY), the author (unless the license does not require you to state this), and a link to the original image.
Here is a how-to guide on finding images and attributing them correctly from educator W. Ian O’Byrne:
If you have any questions, please ask in any of the sessions, contact the tutors, or use the Copyright Guidance Service (for Manchester students).
Plagiarism
Permitting reuse of your work might mean other people can publish it or build on it, but it does not give them the right to pass it off as their own. Whenever you include or refer to a work or ideas which are not your own, you should reference it appropriately. See our MLE resource on plagiarism below and the University guidance on plagiarism/academic malpractice for advice.
Try it out
As a participant in Digital Society, you have an opportunity to ‘try’ licensing your work by publishing your contributions to this module. If you have not done so already, we suggest you publish a post (use the tag digisoc so that participants can find it), sharing a brief thought on your interest in the topic, and read the license options (Ready to publish? → Visibility and license options → License). You might like to choose one of the licenses under ‘Some rights reserved’, based on how you would like to make your post available.
