Copyright, Piracy and Ethics

I have analyzed the following two situations prepared by Buddy Phillips and will discuss the copyright law and issues associated with those situations.

1. A teacher in your school (who has a really rowdy bunch of monsters) 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. Sites such as Sports Illustrated, ESPN. DOD, Rock Music Hall of Fame. They make great presentations and become great kids. What are the copyright implications??

Fair use guidelines for educational multimedia students can use copyrighted materials to create multimedia projects if they use their projects for "educational uses in the course for which they were created."* The students must credit the sources used (identifying the source of the work, including the author, title, publisher, and place and year of publication), display the copyright notice and provide copyright ownership information (including the copyright notice, year of first publication, and name of the copyright holder). They must also state on the opening screen and any print material a notice that "certain materials are included under the fair use exemption of the U.S. Copyright Law and have been prepared according to the multimedia fair use guidelines and are restricted from further use."* In addition, there can be no more than two copies of a project, one of which kept by the creator and the other held in the school's library or media center.

Since it seems to be only copyrighted images the students' used, they must limit the amount in this way: they may use up to five photographs or illustrations by one person and no more than 15 images or 10% (whichever is less) of the photographs or illustrations from a single published work.

2. 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 can down load and use what part of the web page without infringing on copyright?

You can use a link with only a URL and the title of the site, but you cannot copy and post a link that contain descriptions of the linked sites. You should not download graphics, including bullets, logos, fonts, photographs and illustrations, unless they are clearly identified as being available to share. Then you must follow the instructions given on the website about posting a credit. You should not frame information from another website and NEVER delete the site's identifying information or make it look as if the information is your own. You should avoid deep-linking to an interior page of a site, because that might bypass advertising or identifying info on a site's main page that may deprive the copyright owner of revenue. You may also not copy a site's html code.

* Applying Fair Use to New Technologies. (n.d.). Retrieved July 2, 2002, from http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr280d.shtml

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