Copyright

According to Wikipedia, copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute, and adapt the work.  Copyright does not protect the ideas, only their expressions.

Taking the Mystery out of Copyright from the Library of Congress is a great resource for teachers that I just found during this search, which I plan to try out in my Web Design and/or Multimedia classes.  In Foundations of Educational Technology with Dr. Jurkowski, he shared a link with us that I have been using that the students really like.   It is A Fair(y) Use Tale, which uses clips from Disney movies (ironic, I know) to teach about copyright.

Fair Use, according to a government copyright site that I found, is Section 107 of the copyright law, and it contains a list of purposes where the reproduction of a work is fair.  Those purposes include criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.  It also sets out factors to use to determine whether or not a use is fair.  Those include the purpose and character of the use (commercial or nonprofit educational purposes), nature of copyrighted work, amount used compared to the amount of copyrighted work as a whole, and the effect of the use on the value of the copyrighted work.  It also indicated that the distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined.

The idea that the distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear is so true.  I teach copyright, but still struggle with it.  I always try to be overly careful, and the students know it.  I have to remind them that just because they can get it from the internet doesn’t make it theirs to use without permission.  I had a student find some pictures that someone had taken that they wanted to use.  I told him that he couldn’t use them unless he got permission.  He contacted the person and told that he would like to use the pictures for a website that he was doing for a class and that he had no intention of publishing the website.  The guy wrote back and gave him permission.  I reminded the student that he had the permission to use them as he had stated, but that he couldn’t decide to later post the website because that was outside the permission that he was granted.

According to Wikipedia, creative commons licenses are several copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works.  They were initially released in 2002 by Creative Commons (a US non-profit corporation).  You keep the copyright, but allow others to copy and distribute your work if they give you credit. These licenses differ as indicated by Wikipedia’s Creative Commons  Frequently Asked Questions.