Copyright, Piracy, & Ethics

Situation #1

• A teacher in your school 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. She recommends sites such as Sports Illustrated, ESPN, DOD, and Rock Music Hall of Fame. They make great presentations. What are the copyright implications?

This is allowed. The law allows students who create educational multimedia projects containing copyrighted materials to use their projects for educational uses in the course for which they were created. Although this is allowed to do the projects may not put these presentations back on the internet without permission. The projects may be used for educational purposes in the course that they were made for.

Situation #2

• Mr. Hamer is tutoring for the functional writing test out of a copyrighted series of workbooks 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 the day's class.

Under the fair use policy this is not allowed for Mr. Hamer to do. To be covered under the fair use guidelines Mr. Hamer could make one copy for each student if this workbook was only used for one term. Mr. Hamer should request that his school purchase the extra copies that he needs for the course.