Copyright Implications for Educators

How often have you created a PowerPoint with an accompanying song? Have you searched the Internet for content for a lesson? Do you try to use current references to movies, music, TV, books or magazines that make your teaching more relevant or engaging to your students? Have you thought about copyright law as you do any of these things? If you have not, you should. As technology has made access, copying, downloading and sharing easier than ever, it has also brought with it the need to think about the legalities of what is being done. It used to be that we only had to worry about students copying from each other, passing off someone else's paper as their own or using information found in articles or books without properly footnoting them. Now we seriously need to consider whether what we are doing falls within the guidelines of Fair Use.
The four factors that are used to determine Fair Use are:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
2. the nature of the copyrighted work
   
3. the amount and substantially of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
   
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I found it difficult to understand these factors initially. It took many readings of reference articles to begin to make sense of them. I found two articles in particular that explained the dilemma about copyright laws and Fair Use well:
Stanford University:Copyright and Fair Use Overview
Education World: The Educators Guide to Copyright and Fair Use

I think that Fair Use and copyright law is one topic that we need to become comfortable with as educators so that we can make the right choices when it comes to materials that we use, projects that we assign to students and ways that we share or tell them to share their completed works. We need to understand what can and cannot be done so we can go to our schools and intelligently explain why we should not continue to make copies of books instead of purchasing them. We need to be able to explain these rules to our students because although this generation of You Tubers and technology savvy consumers may know how to share, mix, copy, edit and produce content on a variety of subjects, they have little real understanding of copyright law and Fair Use. Teaching the proper guidelines for creating this type of content is no different than teaching what constitutes plagiarism. Mashups are such a part of the culture today that there is no excuse for not knowing what can or cannot be included without permission. (Blog Post 7)