Australian PC World - Images you can't copy, errors you can't handle

Images you can't copy, errors you can't handle

Tip
You'd like to post logos for football teams on your Web pages. Or you'd like to add digitised photos from a newspaper's sports pages or plays captured from TV with your video card. Your friends, however, tell you that you can't. Are they right?
This sort of practice is already rife in the USA, and is growing in Australia, to the despair of those with intellectual property and the delight of lawyers who are doing brisk business stamping out unauthorised trademarked and copyrighted material popping up on the Web.
What can you put on your Web page without invoking a legal firestorm? First, if you want to post something on your page that you think may be copyrighted or trademarked, always ask permission (see the chart below). If you're not sure, ask anyway. Some companies and organizations have put images on their Web sites that the public is free to download. But there are often rules for posting them.
For instance, NASA has an enormous library of photos online
(http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/Library/photo.html). While anyone can download images of a shuttle and post them on a Web page, NASA asks that page owners refrain from posting photos of astronauts, for that might constitute a violation of the astronauts' privacy. NASA also asks that Web page owners refrain from posting any NASA emblem or logo on their pages.
Of course, you can always post those pictures you draw in your paint
program.

What you need permission for...	...and why they're trademarked
Logos of companies, sports teams, products, and charities; comic strip characters; faces or images of celebrities, which can include items like the starship Enterprise and the Batmobile.	Someone owns the image and the right to determine how others use it.
Art and photos from books, magazines, company brochures, greeting cards, newspapers, comic strips, CD-ROMs, and other Web pages, even if you alter them.	They're copyrighted, even if there's no copyright symbol. Someone owns the image as well as the right to determine how others use it.
Single frames, animation sequences, and sound bites from movies, TV radio, audio CDs, and rented or purchased videos, even if you edit or alter them.	They're copyrighted. Even if, as one sports fan argued, "the pictures fly through the air, so they have to be free", they're still copyrighted.
Text from books, magazines, newspapers, CD-ROMs, databases, Web pages, and other people's e-mail.	"Fair use" provisions of copyright law allow you to quote 50 words or less for reviews, but it's still smart to obtain permission from the copyright holder before using the material.

- Judy Heim

Category: Internet
Issue: Nov 1996
Pages: 174-176