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"Chris, would you come in here please?" There was a tone in her senior pastor's voice that made Chris a little nervous. She walked down the hall and opened the door to Pastor Bill's office. The pastor sat in a chair across from his desk; with him was a well-dressed, middle-aged man. Neither of them looked very happy to see her.

"Have a seat, Chris," Pastor Bill said as she tentatively walked into the room. "This is John Hendricks." The man nodded. "He's a professional photographer—he owns Starbright Studio over on Grant Avenue," the pastor continued. "He's here because we have a bit of a problem."

Pastor Bill looked Chris directly in the eyes as he went on. "John makes his living by selling the pictures that he takes. One of the ladies who works in his studio visited here last week, and she noticed that we had a number of his pictures in one of our presentations. Part of her job is to grant usage rights, and she was pretty sure that we never asked to use the photos, so she called John."

"Wow, I didn't mean to do anything that would hurt anyone!" Chris responded. "I just did a search for pictures for the service, and his shots looked good …"

"… and you didn't bother to check to see whose they were, or if you could legally use them," Pastor Bill finished. His tone was calm, but Chris could tell he was fairly upset.

The photographer had sat uncomfortably through the discussion. He looked at Chris and said, "I'm sorry—I feel bad, and I don't want anyone to get into trouble. It's just that I put a great deal of time and effort into finding just the right shots, and I rely on those photographs to pay my bills."

"No, no," the pastor interrupted. "You shouldn't feel bad at all. The problem is completely on our end. We'll immediately check all of our files to make sure that we don't have your or anyone else's photos in there without permission." They all agreed that this was an appropriate course of action and the meeting adjourned. Chris walked away from the meeting with a sinking feeling in her stomach, well aware that things would be changing in the image procurement process.

With the advent of the Internet and digital photography, getting high-quality digital images for use in videos and presentations has become as easy as a quick Google search and a few mouse clicks. Unfortunately, finding photos that are legal to use is not that simple.

In 1988, the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act gave photographers and video creators both the intellectual rights to their artwork and the copyright to the actual physical works themselves. Copyright law exists to protect the authors of "artistic works" in the much the same way that it protects inventors—however, it is difficult to download an invention such as a diesel engine or an electron microscope from the Internet! Digital photos, on the other hand, can be easily downloaded to a computer in a matter of seconds; from there, it's a simple process to edit them, combine them with other images, and drop them into multimedia presentations.

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