COPYRIGHT

The laws regarding Copyright can be confusing at best. There are a lot of sources available for educators that may be unsure of the procedures to follow when using the internet as a teaching resource. The best rule to follow here is to ask the question if you are not sure what is legal or not, this way you are protected.

Scenario:

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.

Law:

There shouldn’t be a problem with the teacher downloading the files from the web to use for classroom instruction. The fair use clause states that “the use of a work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (inc multiple copies for classroom use) scholarship, or research will not be held to constitute an infringement of copyright” http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~mm/socbytes/feb2001/Feb2001_2.htm

The part that could infringe on copyright laws is when she allows the students to copy files and take them home. There is no telling what the students will do with the files and whether they will keep them to themselves. It may be hard to prove why there was no way for the teacher to keep the instruction in the classroom and the number of copies she would have to make would exceed the authorized limit.

There is also no mention as to where the teacher obtained the files. If the files were “legitimately acquired” from a site such as MP3.com, then that would be one thing, but in any case, the material cannot be distributed. As The Educator’s Guide to Copyright and Fair Use states “You can use it, but you can’t spread it around.” http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright_answers.html

Scenario:

Mr. Hamer is tutoring for the functional writing test out of a copyrighted series of work books from Houghton 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.

Law:

The series of workbooks from Houghton Mifflin are copyrighted and Mr. Hamer is using the information to instruct his class. Since the workbooks are available at the Houghton Mifflin website, he would have “legitimately acquired” the material so the fair use clause would apply here. The problem lies in that he makes a lot of copies of the workbooks over a period of time.

According to the Fair Use Guidelines for Multimedia Projects listed in the Education World website,http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr280d.shtml, the guidelines state that “no more than two copies of a project can be made.” There are also guidelines governing the amount of copyrighted material that can be used. Granted these are only guidelines, but they exist to help educators understand and not break the copyright laws. It may be better for Mr. Hamer to print certain parts of the workbooks that fit his lessons, not the entire documents.