Under the law, most documents written by employees represent the position and commitments of the organization itself. There are always legal issues to consider when writing a professional document. Professional documents can serve as evidence in disputes over contracts and in product liability or product recall lawsuits. All company documents may be subpoenaed; documents from memos and emails to proposals and studies can be subject to review by a court of law.

Sometimes technical writing is the cause of a lawsuit. Directions for a company’s product may not have been clear, resulting in problems. For this reason, a general guideline is that instructions should be understandable, clear, concise, and written at the fourth to sixth grade reading level. Also, to avoid lawsuits, manuals and instructions often include every possible danger involved with a product, even those that might be considered common knowledge. Accurate and complete technical writing can help a company avoid such lawsuits.

Copyright Law

As both a technical writer and a student, you need to know about the concept of copyright—if, when, and how you can use others’ information. Copyright has become a widely discussed topic, especially with the easy availability of information, images, and videos online. It’s really easy to click and save a photograph, a paragraph, or a video from a website. But you need to understand when you can do so both ethically and legally.

The purpose behind copyright law is to protect a creator’s creation. If you come up with a fantastic new logo for a college T-shirt, for example, you’d want credit and compensation for your genius. You might copyright the design and offer it to Empire State College. If they decide to use it, you could grant exclusive rights for free, you might require a one time fee to buy the rights of the design, or you might request a sum of money every time the design is used. All of these negotiations would require you to waive, protect, or sell your copyright. However, if a large discount chain began marketing shirts with your logo, but without your permission, and selling the shirts at half price, both you and Empire would be cheated. Copyright prevents prevent such theft and unethical use.

What Does Copyright Protect?

Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, or descriptions. To use another’s facts, ideas, or descriptions in your work you will need to cite properly using an acceptable form of documentation (APA, MLA or Chicago, for example). Copyright protects creative expression. Creative expression is found in designs (web page layouts, portfolio designs, etc.), logos, pictures, icons, and other creative ways to express information. To use an image, photograph, icon, logo, graph, chart, or layout that was not created by the user and for which the user has no agreement or authorization is an infringement of copyright. It does not matter how benign you believe the use is or how beneficial you feel the use might be to the creator. It’s simply an illegal infringement of copyright to use creations that are not your own if you do not have permission from the creator or his or her agent.

Is it okay to take an image if I can save it to my desktop?

No. It is a mistake to think that an image is only copyright protected if the web page designer has made it so that the image cannot be copied onto the computer. Just because an image can be taken doesn’t mean it is not copyright protected. If you need copyright free images, Pixabay is a useful site, among others. You can enter a term into the search box, and then choose from the free images, all of which have a creative commons CC:0 No Rights Reserved license. There’s a request that asks that you credit the creator and/or link back to the image. Wikipedia is not copyright-free; you need to check the images to see which ones have Creative Commons licensing.

What is Creative Commons?

A lot of work is now licensed under Creative Commons, which identifies work that can be shared and used for free. There are different types of creative commons licenses which identify whether you can adapt the work, use it non-commercially, and more. Check out the Creative Commons website at creativecommons.org.

What about fair use laws? Can’t I use a graphic if I follow the fair use laws?

No. Graphics are not covered under fair use laws, which otherwise allow for small portions of copyrighted material to be used in specific ways. However, as a student using material in an educational setting for a restricted audience, you are allowed to use another creator’s chart, graph, or logo in a paper or presentation, as long as you cite it. However, if you post that image online, then fair use does not apply, as there is not a restricted audience. And a last however—fair use also does not apply to professional writers creating technical documents. For more information on fair use, consult Stanford University Library’s page on Measuring Fair Use: The Four Factors.