| Copyright
Concerns
Another more
realistic option is to get permission from the copyright owner to
scan and use the image. The image may have a copyright notice, telling
you whom to contact. If you are not sure whether a work is copyrighted,
you can contact rights and permissions agencies to help your search.
BZ/Rights & Permissions, Inc. (www.bzrights.com) and Thomson
& Thomson (www.thomson-thomson.com) are two companies in the
business.
If you don't want to deal with the hassles of working with copyright
materials, however, there are many sources for royalty-free stock
photos, background textures, and clip art. These can be purchased
from sources such as PhotoDisc (www.photodisc.com). These images
often come with broad license grants, which enable you to use the
images freely. Be sure to read the fine print, however, to make
sure that your intended use falls within the scope of the license
grant.
Finally, even if you don't get permission, you may be able to make
limited use of a scanned image if that use falls within what is
called "fair use." Whether a use is "fair" or
not is a pretty fuzzy question, and there are no clear rules. As
a general matter, though, the more limited and non-commercial the
use, the more likely it is to be "fair."
By contrast, commercial use of an image without permission will
usually constitute infringement, unless the use is so limited as
to be negligible (e.g. a tiny, insignificant part of the image).
In the business context, many if not most uses will likely be commercial,
so you should not place too much reliance on the idea of fair use.
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