Understanding copyright

Copyright license choice flickr photo by opensourceway shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

An important issue to be aware of as a medical educator and when creating digital learning resources and reproducing them and sharing them online is copyright.  When you’re developing a teaching presentation in PowerPoint or an online interactive tutorial or perhaps a video/screencast you might want to include pictures and illustrations.  To do this you need to make sure that these images are reusable or that you’ve been granted permission to use them.  Many teachers aren’t aware of  these copyright issues or feel it’s a bit of a minefield.  Copyright is quite a complex area and laws on copyright can vary from country to country so it’s important that you are aware of how the legislation applies in the context of your own teaching.

In this section of the workshop you’ll gain an understanding of how you can source images that you can reuse and incorporate into your own learning materials and go on to share these these online and electronically with your students.

Copyright – A definition

This is what Wikipedia has to say about copyright:

Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country, that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to its use and distribution, usually for a limited time, with the intention of enabling the creator (e.g. the photographer of a photograph or the author of a book) to receive compensation for their intellectual effort.

Copyright is a form of intellectual property, applicable to any expressed representation of a creative work. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders. These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and “moral rights” such as attribution.

To reproduce a copyrighted image, piece of music, animation, video etc you might typically have to pay to reuse it for your own purposes or get permission from the creator of the original work to use it.  This also applies to any sort of content that you might find on the web.

Creative Commons 

Over recent years many people and organisations have started to take advantage of Creative Commons (CC) a set of free licences that allow individuals to licence their works for reuse under certain conditions or to put them into the public domain.  A creative commons license allows people to share their creativity, knowledge and images with like minded people in a way that is not for profit. It’s something that works both ways, so if you add an image and make it ‘CC use’ then others can use and share the image, and likewise you can search for ‘CC use’ images.  In an educational context content which is published under a CC licence for reuse is typically referred to as an open educational resource or OER.  Watch this video to find out more about Creative Commons.

Finding CC images

When you do an image search on Google or Bing the default search setting is to show you all the images on the web without any filtering.  By doing an advanced search you can select the settings and specify that your search will only show you images that have been licenced for reuse.  You’ll see that there are different levels of CC licence, some allow use for commercial purposes and some also allow you to modify the original work.

— ACTIVITY 1 —

Do a Google images search for ‘heart’, ‘myotomes’ and/or ‘brain’ or a search term relevant to your own specialty.

Run the search again but  as an advanced search and apply a filter to the ‘usage rights’ so that your search returns images that are ‘free to use or share’ or ‘free to use or share or modify’.  The video below shows you how to run an advanced search.

In your group discuss how many images you got after filtering and whether you found this  surprising? Did this make the image search easier? Were the results more limiting after you filtered by licence? Post one of the images you found after filtering with licenced as free to use or share.

— ACTIVITY 2 —

Many images have a coloured background which can look a bit unsightly when you insert them into a PowerPoint slide, blog post or an online learning tutorial (as it can interfere with your background) so it can be helpful to add a further filter to your search so that you can find images with a transparent background.

Return to your search results filter to show a CC licenced image free to use or share.  Go back into the advanced search settings and in the ‘colours in the image’ field select ‘transparent’ and run the search again.

How many images did you get back once you’d filtered for both transparency and licence?  Did this make this easier? Would you consider using this to improve any presentations you make?

Using Clinical Images

Using clinical images raises further issues around copyright and gaining permission from patients, this is important to maintain patient confidentiality and is good professional practice. The GMC has issued helpful guidelines on making and using visual and audio recordings of patients.  Have a read of these guidelines.  Are there similar guidelines in your own country?

— ACTIVITY 3 —

Make a list  of items you would include on a form for gaining written consent and permission to share clinical images that you’ve taken (eg. a picture of a skin rash). There are samples forms online that you can Google and will help you. It is important to consider the context where these images might be used. Examples of this are classroom teaching, conferences, password protected learning portals or the open web in the form of . Ensure your consent form addresses these appropriately.

Discussion and reflection point: do you think this has implications for where you will use images in your teaching resources?

Other sources of CC images

Typically people tend to look for images via a Google or Bing search but there are other sites that host CC images including:

• Wikimedia Commons which has over 24 million free to use images.
• Wellcome Images
• Flickr – you need to run an advanced search to filter for CC images also check out the NIH-NIAID Flickr photostream.
• Heal – Health Education Assets Library.
• bio Render – A library of thousands of icons covering a wide range of fields of life science. You ned to create an account to use the images.
• Library of Science and Medical Illustrations
• Wellcome Images
• Noun Project – This site has a great collection of icons some are paid for but there are also others are avaialable for reuse under a CC licence.
• Pixabay – this site has free to use images which you can reuse if you create an account.
• Pexels – images that are free to use and can also be modified.
• Freepik – a site with graphics, illustrations and photos that can be reused with attribution.
• Unsplash – this site hosts a wide range of high quality free to use images.

Many of the world’s top museums, libraries and galleries are also sharing many of their works under CC licences.

Take a look at these sites to see the range of images that are available.

Can you find other sources of free to use or reuse images?  Share any examples in the comments section below. Also take a look at this post on Stock images for health and medicine, which has links to other sources of reusable medical images.

— ACTIVITY 4 —

Have a search on Flickr using a term like ‘collaboration’, ‘patient care’, ‘prescription’ or something relevant to your own area of teaching and search.  When you see the results they will be from all levels of copyright!  In the top right corner you’ll see a link to the advanced search where you can then filter the search for CC images only and this will automatically filter out those that aren’t under creative commons.

Choose an image and download and insert into a PowerPoint or .  A key thing to do when you use or post a CC image in a presentation, blog or tutorial is to give attribution to the creator – typically include the link to the image/resource and the name of the individual who made the resource.  A handy tool that you can add to your browser favourites toolbar is the Flickr Attribution Button created by Alan Levine (aka CogDog) which helps generate the attribution in a variety of formats that you can easily copy and paste into your resource.

DIG DEEPER INTO CREATIVE COMMONS

To find out more about Creative Commons and examples of CC and open education projects take a look at the State of the Commons.

Next activity – OERs in Medical Education