Organizing Your Message: Are you a copyright criminal?

It's getting more tempting to infringe on copyright when creating presentations, thanks to many new scanning and duplicating technologies as well as proliferating Web content. But writers, designers, artists and copyright owners are becoming more aggressive, using new tactics and technologies to enforce their rights. If you don't know the rules, you could end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit.

You've seen them at work. Sometimes brazen, sometimes oblivious, they break the law without giving it a second thought. Maybe, without even knowing it, you're one of them.

They're copyright claim-jumpers -- presenters who slip "Dilbert" cartoons, photographs scanned from magazines, graphics downloaded from the Web, photocopies of trade-journal articles, audio files, video clips or CD music into their presentations or handouts with little or no understanding of how they're trampling on someone else's copyright.

Some do it knowingly, assuming their chances of getting nabbed are a small risk for the big payoff of easy access to high-quality prefabricated content. Others are unaware of how their seemingly benign reuse of pre-existing material -- articles, pictures, music, songs, scripts or film clips -- violates copyright law.

Autumn Bell, a training specialist and frequent presenter for the University of New Mexico, says she witnessed her share of copyright abuses in a past life working for a telecommunications company. There, she worked with managers who ordered people to copy other companies' training materials to save money. She also saw plenty of lesser violations, such as flagrant photocopying of manuals and books for mass distribution. In six years, Bell says, "Never once did I hear the word copyright spoken."

Bell believes that many corporate presenters and trainers adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude when it comes to unlawful use of copyrighted material. "The thinking is, 'As long as I don't know, then I can use ignorance as an excuse,'" she says. "They don't want to learn the nuances of copyright law because they figure as long as they can plead ignorance, they'll be safe."

Cold, hard reality

It can be easy for busy presenters to give copyright concerns short shrift; after all, there are deadlines to hit and rehearsals to do. And sometimes that article you read last week in Forbes Magazine or that photo you downloaded from the Web yesterday fits perfectly into the presentation you're giving -- tomorrow. Copyright permission? Who has time? Some token attribution ought to do it, you figure. Surely the copyright owners will welcome the free advertising, right? And what are the chances that they'll even find out?

The reality is: Whether the bulk of your presentations are in-house