Many of us have met this situation before:  you find a wonderful picture from the Internet, and it is perfect for the  presentation you are preparing for, or for the online course that you are conducting. However, you couldn’t find any copyright related information from the website where this picture comes from. We are educators, and we care about copyright and intelligence property. What should we do?

One good tip is to use the new feature of Google image search by the actual image.

To do so, you can first go to http://images.google.com/, then click on the camera icon on the right of the search box,

then upload the picture that you have downloaded from the Internet.

Then you hit search.

All places where this image has been used on the Internet will show up in the search results.

From there, you can easily find the original place where this images has been first uploaded and used (usually it is the oldest webpage).
Another suggestion of finding images from the Internet, is to use the “Advanced Search” function of Google Image search.

Once you click on “Advanced search”, it will bring you to a screen with a “usage rights” option at the bottom. Choose “free to use or share” from this option.

Then do search. The results will be all either Creative Commons licensed or Public Domain. I do recommend that you give attribution for either situation.