Julie McInerney
3-10-03
Slm 521 Copyright elec.
Copyright, Piracy, and Ethics
The following are responses to two case scenarios where copyright infringement may take place.
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.
Mrs Urvardy has a little bit to learn about copyright infringement. According to Carol Simpson who wrote an article in Educational leadership:
Under the clearer guidelines for multimedia, a sample rule states that up to three minutes or 10 percent, whichever is less, of a motion media work may be used in such multimedia presentations as PowerPoint or Hyperstudio.
If the download is less than the allotted time, than she can use it in her classroom. Having the students copy the files and take them home is a no-no because her students have just stolen the work of someone else.
You find an outstanding World Wide Web site on the Internet and want your web page to contain some of the glittering wonderfulness of this site. You down load and use what part of the web page without infringing on copyright.
This is not a smart thing to do. Even though someone else’s web site looks so good that you have to put it into your web site to spruce it up a bit unfortunately, you cannot just take it and modify it. This would be considered plagiarism. According to Carol Simpson’s article in Educational Leadership:
You cannot copy another person's Web page, make changes, and then post it as your own. Like any other form of programming, Web programming is protected by copyright. You also cannot post graphics from other sites without permission of the graphics copyright owner or reprint or redistribute e-mail because it is unpublished and therefore highly protected by copyright. Get permission first."
So the answer would be, no you cannot take someone else’s "glittering wonderfulness." Try to come up with your own wonderfulness legally!