Copyright, AI, and attribution

A few issues we have to consider

Using other people’s work, e.g. downloading an image and using it on our own website.

Looking at the source HTML of a web page to learn how to do something and copying part of it.

What about ChatGPT?

Are you allowed to do it at all?

• Public domain

• Fair use

• Permissive licensing

If you are allowed use it, do you need to give credit?

• Legally?

• Academically?

Guidelines for this class

Focus on doing your own work.

You need to understand everything you produce.

Cite anything you did not create yourself.

Images

Find freely licensed images, get an AI to generate them, or make them yourself.

In your code make a file called credits.txt with a link to the source of any images you used that you did not actually make yourself.

Other people’s code

One of the beauties of the web is that we can look at the source of web pages and learn from them.

It’s fine to look at the source of other people’s web pages to see how things are done.

If you copy anything substantial from somewhere else, you a) need to be able to fully explain it and b) should put a comment citing where you got it from. That comment may be helpful for you later too.