Trying to build a website for school...concerned about legal issues

Pre-College Topics High School Cafe
1

<p>So I’m trying to build a resource section for my high school’s website. I want to put things like lecture notes, review sheets, etc. on it.</p>

<p>In the past three years I have downloaded a lot of notes off of people’s websites, and not necessarily from people I knew. I would typically google things like “AP Calculus Notes” and if I found something, I would download it and use it for myself, even if it came from the other side of the country.</p>

<p>My concern is, am I allowed to re-upload these files onto a site that I create? They were originally on the internet for anyone to download, no password needed or anything, and they were all originally free…so there should be no problem with me up-loading the files onto my site, right? As long as I say “this document was written by _________”, then I am not stealing their work, right?</p>

<p>Thanks for your advice</p>

2

<p>I might just post a sniplet of each one and maybe the full link to try to help with the legal issues and maybe check the links frequently for any broken links.</p>

3

<p>The thing is, I can’t remember the site where I got some of the files. If I say who it was written by, is that good enough?</p>

4

<p>You know, you could always quote like whole sentences (that I assume you copy and pasted the notes from) to search for the website.</p>

5

<p>Here’s an example of what I want to do:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.colinjeanne.net/apus/civics/notes.htm[/url]”>Twilight Falls;

<p>That site directly hosts notes for AP US Gov, even though the site creator did not write the notes. However a link is posted to the original website of where she downloaded them from. I guess sites like this are called “mirror sites”. Are they legal? Or do you have to get direct permission from the original author of the notes to make a mirror site?</p>

6

<p>Don’t do it. The law about what is permitted or not is way too vague for you to do it safely. (I’m a lawyer, and the law is still evolving.) However, you can safely link to their website without uploading or copying from them. And you can set up the HTML so that the linked site opens in a new window for ease of navigation between the linked sites and your school’s site.</p>

<p>Doing this will make your school’s site equally useful, and protect you from potential liability.</p>