Copyright Activity

Situation #1 - A teacher in your school (who has a really rowdy bunch of monsters) makes an agreement with them that they learn how to make power point presentations on sports, war, hunting, rock music and such. She lets them get graphics from anywhere on the Internet. Sites such as Sports Illustrated, ESPN. DOD, Rock Music Hall of Fame. They make great presentations and become great kids. What are the copyright implications??

The teacher would be legally OK to assign this project as long as some rules were followed. According to the Fair Use Guidelines (FUG), students can use copyrighted works for educational purposes. Since this project fulfills a course requirement, it would fall under the FUG. However, this project should be for in-classroom use only. According to an article in TechLEARNING, “under the current law, no teacher can redistribute such material over the Net or any other medium.” The students can use these graphics but they can’t spread them around. The teacher must also understand that the FUG limit the amount of copyrighted material that can be included in educational projects. The FUG state, “up to five photographs or illustrations by one person and no more than 15 images or 10 percent, whichever is less, of the photographs or illustrations from a single published work” can be included in the educational project. Kudos to this teacher for finding a way to motivate the monsters.

Situation #2 - Mr. Jamweimer, the parent of one of our most intellectual students, has paid to download a wonderful computer software program for his little Einstein. Mr. Jamweimer wants "our school" to be the best and sends a copy of the download file to be used by the students on the computers at school. P.S. all of the kids use it and win Nobel prizes in science, literature, physics, chemistry, and playground.

This situation would not be allowed. According to an Education World article, “fair use applies only to software that has been purchased.” This means that the software is licensed to user, not owned by them so Mr. J does not have the authority to copy it for an entire school’s use. The majority of licensing agreements for software indicates that users are not allowed to copy and distribute software. Where some agreements do permit a small amount of copying to illustrate a point, they certainly do not give permission to copy and share with an entire school. In this case, not only is the entire school using the copied version, but the students must also be using the entire program if it has helped them to win coveted Nobel prizes. I am sure Mr. J’s intensions were honest, but his action of copying an entire software program was illegal.