Rebecca Sheehy

SLM 521

Copyright Infringement?

Problem:

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??

Reply:

The copyright laws state that copyrighted material can be used in an educational setting in fair use. This means that the material used has to be assessed based on its level of involvement in the original piece, is it the central point or is it a minor point, and its percentage of the entire piece, does it make up 80% or .9% of the original piece. Guidelines for the law states that multimedia projects can be created by students for use in the class where they were created and to be used in their portfolios as examples of their progress without obtaining permission from the copyright holder. Given this information, we know that the teacher is not infringing upon any copyrights by merely letting her students create multimedia presentations using copyrighted material. What will determine whether these students violate such laws is the amount of copyrighted material used in their projects. Nothing is said about the amount of graphics used by the students, but as written in the law up to five photographs or illustrations from one person or up to 15 images or 10%, the lesser of the two, of illustrations from one published work. These laws are set for students in 6+ grades, however, are not so strict for children in K – 6 grades.

Problem:

Mr. Jamweimer, the parent of one of our most intellectual students, has paid to download a wonderful computer software program for his little Einstein. Mr. Jamweimer wants "our school" to be the best and sends a copy of the download file to be used by the students on the computers at school. P.S. all of the kids use it and win Nobel prizes in science, literature, physics, chemistry, and playground.

Reply:

Mr. Jamweimer has purchased the software program for his own computer in his own home and holds the license for this individual program package. When he copied the program to a disk for use at his child’s school, he was infringing upon the programs copyright by unlawfully reproducing the program. What made this violation worse was that it took away possible sales to that school from the company. The use of this program for the school and the children’s benefit was illegal. Had the software program been bought by the school and used on multiple computers, that would be an entirely different situation.