Copyright and Fair Use

Copyright laws are hot topics right now in schools. "What is Fair Use?" has been a question that has arisen at each school I have attended as well as during my graduate school classes. Although the idea of protecting the intellectual property of another person is important, I find the gray areas very frustrating.

I don't think that anyone who is being honest with himself actually believes that stealing someone else's work is okay. However, the number of pirated copies of DVDs and illegally downloaded music suggests that there are some people that feel entitled to profit from work they did not do. In the past, I have had students who have told me that their parents burned CDs or DVDs. Although their parents did not sell the copies, they are also not buying them. This violates the "effect on marketability"standard of the copyright laws as presented on A Teacher's Guide to Fair Use and Copyright by Cathy Newsome. Although I do tell students that it is against the law to do this, it is a very delicate thing to tell a student that something his or her parent has done is probably illegal. According to the same article, ignorance of the laws is not an acceptable defense for violating them. Therefore, it is important for students to understand this information and for them to (hopefully) share it with their parents respectfully.

Fair Use in schools seems to be a less cut and dried part of copyright laws. Our schools operate on limited budgets, so many teachers are often tempted to save money by copying portions of books and other materials for the students to use. The percentage of the book copied and the purpose for which it is being used help to determine whether or not this is Fair Use. A Visit to Copyright Bay by the University of St. Francis presents information regarding fair use guidelines for making multiple copies. The guidelines state that copying less than 10% of a book for educational purposes may be acceptable if only one copy is made for each student and sufficient time does not remain to gain the author's permission to use the copyrighted material. However, I have heard people make comments such as "who will know?" and "I am just using it for the kids." As Jamie McKenzie points out in Keeping it Legal: Questions Arising out of Web Site Management, people argue "that almost any taking and use of printed materials, software, videos or graphics is permitted because education is a good cause." We owe it to our students to be examples of morality.

With the instant access to information today via the Internet, it is important that we are vigilant in schools about interpreting Fair Use policies as conservatively as possible. The amount of information protected by copyright laws seems overwhelming. The Stanford Libraries' Copyright and Fair Use policy states: "It doesn't matter if an author's creation is similar to existing works, or even if it is arguably lacking in quality, ingenuity or aesthetic merit. So long as the author toils without copying from someone else, the results are protected by copyright." Because of this, we have to respect the intellectual property of individuals no matter what our schools' budgets are.

One of the main challenges we face is that we are assigning students projects that require them to publish their work on websites. Without publishing information of the Internet, the danger of violating Fair Use practices is not as great. One solution is that students could present electronic information to their classmates using presentation programs such as PowerPoint rather than publishing it on the Internet.

There are two things that I was surprised by as a I educated myself about copyright and Fair Use guidelines. I admit that I did not know that it was a violation to show an entire video for entertainment purposes without permission. A Visit to Copyright Bay by the University of St. Francis points out that "This means that you cannot perform a popular video to your students outside of a systematic instructional activity." Luckily, I do not show my students videos that are unrelated to our curriculum, but I have visited many schools that do. I had also not previously considered the copyright implications of Clip Art as mentioned in Jamie McKenzie's Keeping it Legal: Questions Arising out of Web Site Management.

There is so much to learn and I am sure that copyright and fair use questions will continue to be central issues in all school settings.


Works Cited:

Keeping it Legal: Questions Arising out of Web Site Management
Jamie McKenzie
http://www.fno.org/jun96/legal.html

Stanford University Libraries' Copyright and Fair Use Overview
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/

A Teacher's Guide to Fair Use and Copyright
Cathy Newsome
http://home.earthlink.net/%7Ecnew/research.htm#Copyright%20and%20Fair%20Use%20Defined

A Visit to Copyright Bay
University of St. Francis, Joliet, IL
http://www.stfrancis.edu/cid/copyrightbay/index.htm