Most supervisor will feed homework, reports and other such article through plagiarism detectors and they rarely come back clean. These detectors do not check for graphics yet but I am sure it will come one day. Hell, even graduates and research staff tend to be problematic (it is not rare to find PhD supervisors using their student’s work as their own in journals).

But to me this has nothing to do with theft (the original is still there and the original web page it came from still show the image) or even the so called “intellectual property” (a term I absolute hate). Whether it is some text or an illustration, using such thing in your own work is not theft. It is inappropriate in an academic environment since you are being evaluated on it and therefore, using somebody else’s work as your own (or not attributing it properly) is basically akin to lying.

The main problem is that most of the time people do not realise that what they are doing is not appropriate and teaching a student to properly cite is a hard task because it is usually overlook at the undergraduate level. Expecting Joe Random to do so is quite unrealistic and getting angry/offended/legalistic about it, is not going to solve anything.

It is really an ethic problem and an education problem. These days, with the Internet and its huge amount of information freely available instantly, it is not surprising that some people are surprised when faced with part of the internet that isn’t.

Personally, I have always considered that if I do not want people to use my stuff without authorisation (be it source code, publication, photography …) I simply don’t put it online. You can try as hard as your want to stop people for using online resources, but with the way the technology works, you are fighting a losing battle. The simple fact of viewing an image on your browser means that you already have made a copy of said image locally on the machine being used to view it. I am always amused by flickr allowing its users to block viewers to access the image link, when it only takes a few seconds for someone vaguely technical to get it anyway. The only thing you can do to minimise the impact is to only put online a reduced/watermarked version of your work for people to see. If they then use that, then at least all they have is a “crippled” version which cannot really be used in anything that actually matters. But once again, this is not theft. Copyright infringement is not theft.

One can also use some Creative Commons type licenses (http://creativecommons.org/) for the preview photos, for which you can specify different restrictions (no commercial use, no modification, with attribution). This is something I have mentioned a long time ago as alternatives or additions to the royalty free license available on fotolibra.

However, I would caution against “Naming and Shaming” on a UK site. UK defamation law is so cockeyed that the infringer could threaten to sue you (and your ISP) for defamation. He or she never will because the costs are gigantic but your Server company will immediately pull the item from the server and possibly threaten you with your site being taken down. I have a non photographic site about a local campaign http://www.notmo.org.uk that this has happened several times so we had to move the site to Icelandic hosting where they defend free speech.

If you find this a ludicrous situation, support the Libel Reform Campaign http://www.libelreform.org/