In "The Educator's Lean and Mean No Fat Guide to Fair Use," Hall Davidson (1999), executvie director of educational services and telecommunications at KOCE-TV in California, opens with the quintessential questions surrounding media and copyright:
"Is it legal for students to use copyrighted clips from videos, CDs or the internet to create multimedia reports? Can they save these into digital portfolios or post them on a school web site? Does it violate copyright law for teachers to show this student work at educational conferences?" Because copyright is at heart a legal matter, Mr. Davidson's summary of copyright is the most reliable way to inform educators succintly about the law. AUDIO: Teachers can copy portions of recordings for academic purposes other than performances and use them with students. The Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) multimedia guidelines suggest limiting the portion used to 10 percent and no more than 30 seconds.... VIDEO: You can use videotapes and movies for instruction...School-made VCR recordings are more like library books that can be kept for a set time. According to widely accepted guidelines, you can show them for up to 10 days after the broadcast and keep them for an additional 45 days for evaluation purposes. If you want to keep them longer, somebody generally has to pay for them - unless the distributor has chosen to greant educators broader rights, as is often the case with educational television. MULTIMEDIA: Authoring for curriculum-based projects may include material from CDs, books, the Internet, and other sources. The resulting projects cannot be distributed outside the classroom community, although they can be shared with family members since students' homes are considered part of the learning community. INTERNET: Taking things off the Web and using them in projects is okay but posting them back online is not....Posting on a protected intranet, however, is permissible since it's viewed as remaining inside the classroom community. It is generally believed that "implied public access" permits Web site builders to include links to other sites without requesting permission. Netiquette dictates removing such links, however, if the site being pointed to so requests. DISTANCE LEARNING: The Copyright Office recommends extending to teachers and students in a distance learning course the same fair use rights they would have in a regular classroom. In other words, the mere fact that the class is being taught using digital transmission should not cause it to be interpreted as a public distribution or performance. Copyright law is a complex, frequently updated issue as technology changes. It is therefore imperative to keep abreast of changes in the law. The U.S. government maintains a web site to make it possible for you to do so: www.loc.gov/copyright. The CSU, SUNY, and CUNY university systems offer a site with guidelines at www.cetus.org/fairindex.html (except taken from "Teaching and Learning with Technology" published by Pearson Education, Inc, 2003, pg 175) |
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