A federal court ruling announced last week reminds us all of the importance of following copyright. HISD (Houston ISD from Texas) has just been ordered to pay $9.2 million dollars ($9,200,000) due to copyright infringement. (Staff in the Houston school district took willful steps to ignore copyright and the company whose copyrighted materials they copied and circulated without permission now stands to receive millions in belated compensation/damages.)

Original and Doctored Guide

This should serve as a reminder that we should follow copyright. Generally, we shouldn’t be posting or sharing material that we didn’t create or that we don’t know is licensed under Creative Commons.

This includes not only print, but audio and video as well.

Please remember that our district expects staff to respect copyrights.

See Richard Byrne’s posting for three lessons to learn from this, this article for more general info, Google’s Help Center on Copyright and/or this article for more on the HISD ruling.

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