Getting students, and some teachers, to understand the importance of honoring copyright restrictions can be a challenging task. You’ll often hear comments like, “it’s no big deal,” “no one is going to enforce it,” and “it’s for a school project so it’s okay.” The problems with all of those statements are that it is a big deal to the copyright holder, someone will enforce it, and just because it’s for a school project doesn’t mean you can use someone’s copyrighted work.

A while back I found this letter written by Alex Wild and published in Scientific American that does a fantastic job of explaining how to handle an infringement on your copyrighted works. The letter also serves as a lesson to teachers and students who aren’t aware of the real implications of just right-clicking and saving images found online. Pay particular attention to sections four and five of the letter. After reading the letter if your students still say, “well it’s for a project so I can use it” then have them read Alex Wild’s statement on classroom use of his photographs.

If you didn’t see it last fall, Beth Holland and I hosted a free webinar all about copyright as it relates to classrooms. You can watch the webinar recording as embedded below.