For those of you who are interested in pulling images and other kinds of document off the web for use either on this blog or in our assignments, it might be worth just familiarising yourselves with the idea of fair use.
From the wikipedia entry:
Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. It is based on free speech rights provided by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The term "fair use" is unique to the United States; a similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright.
For some more detailed discussion:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/
For an interesting argument (both in the courts and in the press) between an artist and a documentary photographer around the use of the latter's image in the work of the former see:
One thing to note is that all of the issues we have dealt with in our discussion of IRB and Human Subject research are potentially effaced by the concept of Fair Use...
However, to connect back to our archive, the idea of Open source, which has framed the development of DSpace, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source) promotes a model of shared ownership based on collaborative enterprise and mutual acknowledgment gets around some of these issues of ownership...
These issues are highly complex and often debated - any thoughts or links to add?