Let's Japan.org

by **SamhainP8** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 5:27 pm

I’m putting the finishing touches to the website for my business and would like to put up some shots of the textbooks I’ll be using etc.

I’ve checked out a bunch of similar school websites and plenty of people seem to do the same thing i.e. they either take a photo of a pile of the text books they use or do some obvious google image searching and paste together a collage of books to upload to their site.

Common sense tells me that this is in breach of Copyright Laws, though If I’m prommoting the purchase and use of their books (a weak point I know) would they really give a shit?

If they did give a shit I guess I could expect to get a nasty letter asking me to take down the images before they sent their shysters after me. :axe:

by **Wage Slave** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 5:40 pm

I don't know what the letter of the law on this is. I can't see that it will cause any problem in practice at all though. I have some images on my site and I am, as you say, in effect selling their books for them. Reproducing the cover seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do to sell the course and their book. If somebody reproduces sample content then there may be more of an issue. Even then and in extremis, I can't see them doing more than asking you to take it down.

I would just bang them up and get on with all the other things you need to sort out.

by **senseiman** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 8:56 pm

Depends.

If you do something like lay out a few textbooks on a table and take a photo of the whole lot, that isn't going to infringe anyone's copyright. In fact you'll have a copyright in the photo you took.

If you just scan pages or covers from the texts though that would be an infringement of copyright and possibly trademark. And if you take photos from google or whatever and put them up that would be an infringement as well.

They might ignore it assuming you have a small site that is just for your lessons, but I would be a bit careful not to overdo it. Some publishing houses just don't want their images on other people's website because it might give the impression that they are in some way endorsing your website or business, which obviously they aren't.

by **SamhainP8** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 9:27 pm

Good points lads, cleared that up for me :cheers:

by **Wage Slave** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 9:28 pm

Interesting.

I have an images of the covers as part of my course descriptions. They state which book we use and the image is there simply to illustrate that statement. Is there any concept of fair use?

Anyway, It is very common and I have never heard of anyone having a problem but I will ask on an owners' list I am a member of.

by **senseiman** » Tue Mar 01, 2011 10:22 am

Wage Slave wrote: Is there any concept of fair use?

Yes, but fair use doesn't really cover this. It mainly just gives you a right to do things such as make a copy of something for your own personal use. Putting it online would go beyond that.

But like you say, people don't get called out on this sort of thing much. It isn't worth the publisher's time to do so. Only if you become a massively successful school with branches all over the place would they be likely to sit up and take notice of this type of infringement.

by **SamhainP8** » Tue Mar 01, 2011 10:55 am

I was going to go with something like this:

Instead of something crappy looking like this:

Guess I'll go with what I think looks best until I get a tap on the shoulder.

by **eb0li** » Sat Mar 05, 2011 10:51 pm

good job on choosing Up and Away

by **Edogaijin** » Sun Mar 06, 2011 9:39 am

I used to buy my books through Nellies Bookshop (online) for my school.
This was in the early days of my school's website and I wasn't very good at web building. (still).

In a rush to get things happening I linked the photos directly from their website. (after all I was selling their books).
I should have copied the photos and uploaded them to my server or even gone one step further and asked them how they'd like me to advertise their books. But always one to take the quickest short cut I just used the pics on their server.

After a while I guess a lot of people were linking to their site and chewing up bandwidth. Their web manager decided to put a stop to this and replaced all the photos with porno shots. I didn't know when they did this but one day my wife came running in to the PC room shouting...

Why do you have porno shots all over your school website?
:moon: