See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

Copyright laws are interesting. It's a topic which makes people recoil, and others lash out.

Ask anyone whether they have broken copyright laws, and they will say never! Yet they somehow possess an extensive collection of movies, music and images on their computer...

So a discussion on Copyright on the web is often dismissed and not deemed to be particularly important.

The reality of such laws had quite and impact on me recently. A new client wanted to have their website remade. It turns out that they had been nailed for Copyright infringement! The majority of the images on the site had been stripped as they happened to have been lifted from another site, the the owners weren't happy and threatened legal action.

I'd have to say it's the first time I've heard of such a thing happening. I for one have not breached copyright on the test website i created. Having no images made that easier (and in hindsight i probably should have added one anyway...).

Something as innocent as adding the University logo to a page would be seen as a breach of Copyright. The logo is the intellectual and trading property of the organisation and is what they use to represent themselves. For someone else to use that what add an assumption that they are somehow speaking or acting on behalf of the organisation and so is not right without the explicit permission of the owner.