Complying with Copyright Just Got Easier
Justin Bathon on Tuesday, January 14, 2014 at 11:30AM One of the huge areas of potential copyright violations if you are a techy like me are around images. I post images to the blog, add them into my powerpoints, upload them to sites, ... so available images to use are important to me. All those same uses also apply to our kids and teachers in schools everyday.
On the web, only a few images are available to use without a direct copyright violation though. I usually try to find those images when producing documents, but it can be difficult. Compflight is a great tool and there are others such as the Creative Common search. These search engines take extra time to search and their search functions are not as powerful as core search giants like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Well, Google has made this process easier by adding a licensure limitation on your image search directly on the search page (see image). Here is the procedure:
(1) run a search (such as "education law" below),
(2) go to "Images,"
(3) click "search tools,"
(4) use the "Usage Rights" drop down to select the licensure category.
Now, this is not a fool proof method in that Google is not guaranteeing the license. To be safe you need to independently check the license, but it is a great time saver and a really good step by Google during this Copyright Week to make the world a slightly more functional place (even if this doesn't address the core issue of the broken copyright system).
