Some people believe that if an image appears anywhere on the internet, it may be freely used on anybody's web pages. This belief is absolutely wrong.

Using someone else's artwork is as bad as using someone else's words. It's plagiarism, and it's illegal. The exception to this is if the creator of the art explicitly states that you are free to use it. You will sometimes find such a permission statement on a website.

It is also illegal to scan and use images from printed books and magazines unless the copyright date was more than seventy years ago. This refers to the most recent copyright date. Thus, if the copyright statement in the book says © 1900, 1970 that means the copyright was renewed in 1970 and it won't be legal to use on the internet until... the year 2040? Well, no, actually. Even if the copyright has been renewed the work passes into public domain 95 years after publication. Therefore, the work in question became legal to use in 1995.

Copyright law started getting really confusing in the late seventies. Luckily for us, the Michigan Library Consortium has published helpful guidelines that explain what printed material is and is not legal to digitize. Clicking the link will open a new window on your web browser.

You might have noticed that this law is much stricter than the copyright law that governs class handouts and PowerPoint presentations, which frequently include a sampling of copyrighted materials. That's because classroom use of documents and images is governed by the Fair Use exemption in the Copyright Act of 1976 (this link will open a new window on your browser), which enables instructors and students to use a limited amount of copyrighted material for classroom use only. As soon as the printed material goes outside the classroom and onto the internet or another widely broadcast medium, such as a televised classroom lecture, we are no longer protected by Fair Use because now the material has been made available to the general public.

To answer the questions that inevitably arose regarding questions of Fair Use--which had been invented at a time when photocopying was the pinnacle of educational technology--in a Distance Education environment, President Bush passed the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act. This link, too, will open a new window on your browser.

Quoting published text is legal in the case of publications that have not yet entered the public domain, but you need to follow the standard rules for plagiarism: material has to be cited and you can't "mirror" somebody else's work. That is, you can only use short quotations interspersed with your own commentary. You may not reproduce a significant portion of a printed text that is still protected by copyright.

There is no legal restriction on creating a hyperlink that leads to any page on the World Wide Web. Therefore, if you absolutely need an image to make your point, but you cannot use it because of copyright restrictions, you can put a hyperlink on your page that will lead the user to the page where the image is located.

Creating a hyperlink to a page with an image on it is not the same thing as "linking directly to an image," which refers to the practice of calling up somebody else's image in your <IMG SRC> tag, such as <IMG SRC="http://www.someone'ssite.com/image.jpg">. This is absolutely illegal and besides that it is morally wrong, wrong, wrong! Linking directly is known as bandwidth theft, and it really is theft in the sense that it directly takes money out of somebody else's pocket. Here's why (this link will open a new window on your browser).