There is also a legal loop hole your teacher forgot as the arm chair lawyer, it's called, "public domain/fair use". When you post a picture for example on Facebook you are agreeing to have it released pretty much world wide unless you turn on privacy settings.
This said fair use pretty much means you may display it so long as you are not selling it. Example: Album Covers are shared all the time as ref to a an artist. However if I sold that cover as part of a ripped CD then I am violating several laws. Know if I have an account with iTunes who is is authorized to sell that artists music and I use the cover to draw a client to the song... Then a legal mechanism for the sale allows for the fair use. I am going through and authorized distributor... No this was my toilet version of the law.
Below is a proper citation of for fair use of information. We do this on IAAM and have never had an issue in fact, several record labels have said we are right on the money with how we run the forum.
"To determine fair use, the effect on the market for or the value of the copied work are also considered. This means that if what you copy is something that is sold (for instance, online journal articles of the IEEE), a fair-use defense is probably not available. Finally, it is okay to use digital images and text with permission, assuming the party giving the permission has the right to do so. A lot of stuff on the Web can easily be copied, but note that even a typical news story and its pictures, for example, cannot legally be used at all. The standard Associated Press ”all rights reserved clause” says, ”This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.” Other Web sources of images and data, however, may freely allow copying via their Web site user agreements.
Finally, do not confuse copyright infringement with plagiarism. Repeating someone’s words and ideas without credit is plagiarism, but plagiarism is not generally actionable in court. Conversely, individual phrases, slogans, formulas, ideas, and raw data are generally not copyrightable. Also, it’s a mistake to think something can be copied just because there’s no copyright notice. Copyright protection attaches to a work when it is created, and a copyright notice is not needed.
In the end, fair use is not a pretty picture, because there are no absolutes: fair use involves a balancing test instead of a rigid set of rules. What people think is fair use often is not, and new technologies only muddy the waters further."
About the Author
KIRK TESKA is an adjunct law professor at Suffolk University Law School and is the managing partner of Iandiorio & Teska, an intellectual property law firm in Waltham, Mass. His book, Patent Savvy for Managers , is now available online and at most major bookstores.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/what-can-you-legally-take-from-the-web
