International students and awareness of digital scanning issues

The legal and ethical issues raised by the ability to use desktop scanners to convert images into digital data for manipulation, enhancement, and eventual incorporation into a publication are discussed. Potential legal problems involve copyright infringement and libel, both of which are familiar concerns to technical writers, although they tend to be associated with text rather than graphic images. Ethical issues raised by the available technology include concerns about enhanced advertisements. To maintain public confidence in digitally processed images, technical communicators in academia must provide guidelines for their students, both US and international, who will encounter many of these legal and ethical issues in the workplace