If we don’t teach our students about respecting the copyrights of artists, who will?

Although this case is a bit of a grey area.

“I attend breaking news stories across the county of Sussex as my role as a full time bonafide news-gatherer,” he wrote in a letter to the court. “In this case one of the firefighters asked if he could tweet a picture of mine I said yes, he did, and this is the picture that Sky News embedded on their website, for their own gain, in respect of web hits.”

Twitter gives us the code to embed tweets in other web sites. The information is stored on Twitter’s servers, and the person who posted the tweet arguably has control by leaving up or deleting the tweet. Just like posting to Tumblr implies you’re OK with someone reblogging you, posting to Twitter (or telling someone else they’re allowed to post your photo to Twitter…) implies you’re OK with embeds … though not everyone knows this is a feature.

Either way, it would make for an interesting classroom debate on ownership and permission. Getting students to think about it is the first step towards getting them to understand it, and cases that aren’t cut-and-dry are more likely to lead to interesting discussions.