Is it legal to use photos from a website for a school assignment?

I can’t imagine it begin a problem. If it is between you an a teacher I doubt the RIAA is going to sue you and it could be argued as fair use.

Just make sure you don’t cross the line into plagiarism with the text. Just make brief notes on the text and then re-write in your own words.

From a copywrite standpoint, probably not. From a “people giving a shit” standpoint, go for it.

There are websites where you can get free public domain photos for personal and commercial use. Anytime you click on a photo from the internet, most of them will say, “image may be subjected to copyright.” Fair Use Act and copyright laws are kind of gray areas. The only way to truly use copyrighted material is to get explicit permission from the holder.

Most likely nothing will happen to you.

The correct way to go about it is, save the photo, paste into your documents and have a caption. Who, What, Where, When, How, Size (this is for art pieces), Gallery (this is for art pieces), Place Found/Created, Website. That should suffice for a basic research paper. (Obviously for the bibliography you’d list the site it was found and the photographer if possible.

And you pretty much have the right idea in your “detail” section anyhow! :D

If it’s for a school assignment it is fine. Once something is on the web it’s pretty much in the public domain anyway. That doesn’t mean you can copy chunks of text into your assignment and claim it is your own work. Your teacher will notice and won’t be pleased. Express your own thoughts in your own words and give a source for any quotations you use.

If you attribute the source of the photograph both as a caption as @_Whitetigress suggests and include the info in your reference list, you will be fine.

It’s the same as using a photo of painting, well-known or not. The best-known paintings do not need to be credited (viz; Mona Lisa): my pix of Milo need an attribution.