Bad times for teachers and students stealing images

As a producer of web technologies that provide teachers and learners with online content production tools I often find myself involved in a discussion around the legitimacy to use images found on the internet in students' and teachers' personal projects.

Although teachers over the globe complain that the internet facilitates plagiarism and encourages copying and pasting of text they usually don't show the same criticism when it comes to using/stealing pictures and graphical data.

It is quite common that teachers themselves consider the web as a free online clip art gallery and that they see no harm in using whatever they can find to pimp up their worksheets, slides or website pages without crediting their sources.

No wonder then, that they apply the same logic to images that students can find and copy-paste to decorate their personal printed or online work. Obviously teachers' sensitivity is different depending of the nature of the data that is used or stolen. In school, written text has a much higher status than an image. While copying and pasting graphical data is considered common practice, copying text without quotation marks and indications of the source is considered being a unscrupulous temptation to cheat and to avoid personal effort.

With TinEye by Idée Inc. now comes a search engine based on an image identification technology capable of finding images and variations of images on the internet. TinEye provides authors of visual data with an easy way to detect copies of their creations on websites even if the original version has been cropped, scaled, merged, renamed or colored.

Of course this is not the only application of TinEye but it is one that could have a major effect on schools.

My advice to teachers: Start today with using license free images (for example from Wikimedia Commons) or own creations. Don't make a difference between respecting authors of written text, of sound productions or of images, name your sources and teach your students to do the same.

(Got the hint from Slashdot)

Image source and copyright information :

"This is a faithful photographic reproduction of an original two-dimensional work of art. The original image comprising the work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:

This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. (...)"