UNDERSTANDING COPYRIGHT: CREDIT WHERE CREDIT’S DUE

Respecting the creative efforts and copyright of other authors and artists is an important issue when downloading or cutting and pasting material from the web.

This post looks at how to acknowledge other people’s copyright when building your own projects, essays or presentations. The next post, A Guide to Citations and Bibliographies, looks at how to use citations and bibliographies when submitting work to a school, college or university that includes copyright material.

Here is a summary of our own approach.

Visitors to lightcolourvision.org will find short quotes and the odd image within our articles, explanations and references that have been sourced from websites and other publications during our research process. The aim is to produce our own content on a wide range of topics that is as accurate and up to date as possible. Sometimes other people’s ideas are buried in our writing and often this material is covered by copyright.

Let’s look at how other people’s work is acknowledged and their rights protected at lightcolourvision.org.

Best practice lets readers know where ideas and information come from. We use in-text citations or add references at the bottom of a page.

An in-text citation usually looks like this (Author, 2000, p. 10) or like this (Name of website, 2000) and each citation is linked to full bibliographic references so that readers can accurately identify sources. When a reference is to another website, another link can be included so that readers can see things in their original context.

With all this in mind, we have established the following guidelines for ourselves.

Referencing texts:

  1. In-text citations and full bibliographic references are provided wherever possible.
  2. All material that appears on the site takes the form of brief extracts and is used in a manner consistent with the doctrine of fair use.
  3. Extracts and quotes are used on the site solely for the purposes of teaching, scholarship, research, criticism and comment.
  4. All our articles and other written material is free to download.
  5. Owners of Copyright material with any concerns about how their work is used on the lightcolourvision.org website are encouraged to get in touch with us using the contact information provided below.

Referencing images:

  1. Copyright notices and full bibliographic information are appended to all images.
  2. All images that appear on the Lightcolourvision.org website (including those authored by lightcolourvision.org contributors) have a Creative Commons license or Public copyright license.
  3. All our images are free to download.
  4. A Creative Commons license protects people who use or redistribute an author’s work from concerns over copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license.

Like to know more?

Please contact [email protected] if you have questions about any aspect of this project.

Or you can use this FEEDBACK FORM.

And please let us know if you are interested in getting involved and helping to develop the site.

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