POLS 240: Taylor, K. (Fall 2025): Images

Using instructive images in your presentation is a great idea!

Many images we see on the "free" web are protected by "all rights reserved" copyright, meaning that the creators of those images own those images and we do not have rights to use them as we wish*.There may be some situations that allow us to use copyright protected images, for educational purposes for example, that may fall under "fair use" guidelines. Fair use, however, gets inappropriately applied quite a lot in educational settings, running us the risk of violating copyright law.

TCC, your Learning Innovation department, and your TCC Library all strongly encourage you to use openly-licensed images even in your school work. Most images that are openly-licensed use Creative Commons licensing. If you don't know much about that, you can find out here.

*All rights reserved copyright is the default - you do not have to do anything special to have something your create 'copyrighted' - it is automatically copyright protected under the law, unless you openly license your work. Therefore, if you find an image (or other work) that is not labeled as "open" or CC-licensed, assume that it is copyright protected.

logo above from: "Creative commons" by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Fill in the blanks in the OpenWA attribution builder, and just like that, you have yourself an attribution (citation) for the openly-licensed CC image you are using in your presentation.

Here is a screenshot of my process for making the citation for the image of the caffeine powder above.