Mrs. Urdvardy, a music teacher, downloads MP3 files from the Web and uses them to instruct her students in the various kinds of music. She allows students to copy the files and take them home, listen to them and complete a worksheet

For educational multimedia, the fair use guidelines state that it is within a teacher’s rights to use downloaded music files in her curriculum based course. The guidelines allow her to send the music home with the students because it falls under directed- self study since they have to answer a worksheet about the music. The fair use guidelines do however place restrictions on her assignment. The students are not allowed to have access to the material if they are going to copy it since it is copyrighted material to begin with. In addition to that restriction, the MP3 files are supposed to be limited to 10% of the entire piece or 30 seconds, whichever is less. Due to these restrictions, I would suggest that the teacher not use assignments such as these because she can’t assure that a student will not copy the music and 30 seconds of music is probably not going to benefit the children like she is hoping. To be on the safe side of everything, I think that the teacher should not do assignments like this in the future.

Mr. Hamer is tutoring for the functional writing test out of a copyrighted series of work books from Houghtin Mifflin. He has 27 students but only 20 books were purchased for his class. The same material is available at the HM web page. She prints enough pages for her kids each morning for today's class.

The material on the website will presumably still be copyrighted. If the teacher were to print out a single copy of the material, he would still be within his rights under the fair use guidelines. However, because the teacher is printing out more that one copy, he now must follow the guidelines for multiple copies. Under the multiple copies guidelines, no “consumable works” such as work books or standardized tests can be copied without infringing on the copyright. Since the material the teacher is printing out comes from a workbook, he does not have the right to do so. His best bet is to have students share to workbooks or to copy questions down on paper and answer them that way. By downloading from the internet, the teacher is still breaking the copyright laws and should not be making more than a single copy of the workbook page. This activity is definitely not allowable under current guidelines.