Legal/Ethical question

I am preparing a large powerpoint presentation as part of my capstone project. I hope to use about 100 images off the web. Assuming that none of the images is marked "copyrighted" and I give proper attribution at the end of the session, is it OK to do this? The presentation will not be duplicated nor seen more than the one time. It is impractical, if not downright impossible, to get permission from the many different image sources.

 

First of all, an image needn't be marked "Copyright" in order to be copyrighted.

Second of all, there's a vast difference between legality and ethics.

It is probably neither ethical nor legal to do it... but I would guess that even those who hold the copyrights would, after a moment to think about it, agree that that's probably, as a practical matter, only in a technical sense.

That said, the fair use doctrine may very well permit it, especially because it's for an educational purpose.

The only person who can advise you is an attorney, and if you're that worried about it, then I strongly recommend that you consult with one.

Now... that having been said, the real question is, "Can you get away with it?" And the answer to that, as a practical matter, and ethical considerations and/or legality be damned, is "almost certainly, yes." Whether or not you should actually try -- or whether you could live with yourself if you do -- is another matter altogether.

I will neither advise you to do it, nor tell you that you shouldn't. Only you can make that decision. Nor will I tell you whether I would, under the same circumstances... mostly because I don't, at this point, know. If a gun were pointed to my head and a demand made of me to just shut-up and boil it down, I'd say you were making a mountain out of a molehill, and shouldn't worry too much about it. But that's not the same as advising you to go ahead and do so.

So... you're in pretty much the same place now as you were when you started, aren't you? Some help I turned-out to be, eh?

 

DesElms: thanks for mentioning the Fair Use Doctrine. I checked into it and got this off a government web site:

"The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: 'quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.'"

Based on this legal interpretation, I'm going to go with it and relax.

 

More important than the remote possibility of getting hailed into court is the effect of the borrowing on your audience.

It sounds as if you're using the images as objects of your study, as a literary critic might include chunks of copyrighted literature in a critical article, and not as elements of your own procedure (e.g. a slide of bullet points summarizing your views). So your graders can easily distinguish your original work from the data that you've borrowed.

Still, the mechanics of attribution are a matter of convention which can vary from context to context, so I'd suggest asking your instructor or graders how to go about it. They don't want to be surprised and you don't want to be surprised.