Fair Use & Copyright

What I Knew

Fair Use and Copyright are very important things to understand when working with media. I always knew that we needed to sight our sources when using someone else's work for classes, but I didn't know the rules of who could use what, and for what reasons. I also did not know what Fair Use was, and I learned that Copyright is the law that gives the owner control over their work for a certain amount of time, and Fair Use is sort of an exception to that law that says people can use it in certain circumstances. 

What I Discovered

I wondered if you had to do something in order to get a copyright, but Purdue's website answered that question when it said that a work becomes copyrighted when it is written or recorded. Fair Use, I had never heard of before, but I have been using all through school when I used media off of the internet for school projects. Through the readings I discovered that there are a number of factors that can make it possible to use part of someone else's work without asking permission. It depends on the purpose that you are using it for, the nature of the original work, how much of the work you are using, how important the part you are using is, if it will effect the work's market, and lastly if it is transformative. Transformative means that it is being used in a new way that is different from its original use. 

Why it is Useful

Things like school projects or educational presentations are examples of uses that are covered under Fair use. Even though Fair use let's you use people's work without asking, you may still have to site the source that you got it from so that you are giving them credit for their work. There are a lot of resources out there to help find media that you are able to reuse and even modify. 

Examples

I found this picture on Google but I used the advanced search options to find pictures labeled for uncommercial reuse with modification, and the original source of the picture was Wikimedia. I think that this is a good way to find usable pictures because it gives you a lot to choose from, where some of the other options give you less to choose from.

This photo I found using iStock which is a website that has images that are free to use. I found this website on the article that we were assigned, "The Ultimate Guide to Finding Free Legal Images Online". I thought that it gave me a lot of really good pictures to choose from so it was great in that aspect, however the iStock watermark is across all of them. I chose both of these photos because sunsets and dogs are two of my favorite things!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maui_-_Sunset.jpg

http://www.istockphoto.com

https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/basics.html#1