Sarah Debnam

SLM 521/Fall 2004

October, 19, 2004

*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. She recommends 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??

The students would be allowed to get graphics from the Internet for their Power Point presentations. The fair use copyright guidelines allow this as long as these great students do not grow up and become famous and post their Power Point presentations on the World Wide Web or make their presentations available for mass distribution. It is this distribution of copyrighted material that becomes illegal.

*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.

It is my understanding that this would be permissible under the Copyright Act of 1976 as long as these copies were made after 7 more workbooks had been ordered and the copies from the web page were immediately destroyed when the real workbooks arrived. This action would be allowable under the fair use guidelines because the teacher did not have time to wait for the workbooks to be ordered. If the workbooks had not been ordered, Mr. Hamer would be in trouble with the copyright law! It would also be allowed to make copies as long as he made copies of only those pages in the workbook that satisfied his learning objectives for his tutorial.