Viewing Webpages

I am enjoying looking at all the different webpages people in the class are coming up with. The all have their own style, and I can get a lot of good ideas from looking at what everyone is doing.

I still need to look more into copyright and fair usage issues for my own website. I did download some images, but I want to make sure that it is legitimate to use them. I'll add to this blog when I find out more.

As for the issue of copyrights, it seems that you can informally copyright any work you do by simply writing "copyright" on it, but you would need to register it at the copyright office (for a $75.00 fee) if you decided you wanted to take someone to court for infringement of copyright.

The fair use information I found was much foggier. There is fair use of certain things for educational purposes, and sometimes other purposes. For example, if you are critiquing a novel, it is fair to quote the novel without the author's permission in order to critique it. That makes perfect sense. But it does not necessarily follow that I can copy anything I want to any place I want because I am a teacher. If I am making an educational website, does that mean that I can use any image I want in any way? That hardly seems right.

I'll need to do some more reading.