COPYRIGHT

Brian Tombs

SLM 521

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 is not a problem with the teacher downloading the files from the web to use for their classroom instruction. According to the fair use clause “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 of the scenario that could break copyright laws is when she allows the students to take the files home after copying them. She has no way of knowing what the students will use them for. It would be hard to prove why she allowed them to take the files home and not keep them in class, since they were using them in class anyway.

We really do not know where she really obtained the files from. If the files were “legitimately acquired” from a site such as MP3.com, then there would be no problem, but 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. He prints enough pages for his 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 issue here is that he made a lot of copies for his students.

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. I know that these are only guidelines, but they are there to help educators understand the rules of copyright better, and to help them from breaking those rules. Mr. Hamer would have suited himself better if he would have printed parts of the document that fit into his lesson, rather than the entire document.