INST 5400 - Copyright

    My research on copyright issues began with a search on fair use since it is something I was not as sure of as I was other topics related to copyright.  The first sentence of the second paragraph from Fair Use Guidelines For Educational Multimedia states, “there is no simple test to determine what is fair use,” a great start to help me determine what exactly fair use is.

  Upon further research I realized that a statement that tells you that there is no easy way to determine what is illegal and what is not could be worse, as there are clear criteria you can follow to determine if you are breaking the law or not.

    There are four criteria that allow you to determine if a piece of work is fair use.  They include: (1) the purpose and character of 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 substantiality 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.

    According to Fair Use and Copyright For Teachers copyright is “a property right attached to an original work of art or literature.  It grants the author or creator exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, adapt, perform, or display the protected work. […] A copyright gives the author or owner the right of control over all forms of reproduction, including photocopies, slides, recordings on cassettes and videotapes, compact disks, and other digital formats.”

    Creative Commons licenses, according to Wikipedia, are licenses that allow the creator to decide how the end-user may use the product. .  According to CreativeCommons.org there are six main creative commons licenses that determine what individuals may do with the work. They are attribution, attribution share alike, attribution no derivatives, attribution non-commercial, attribution non-commercial share alike, attribution non-commercial no derivatives.  

    Creative commons can be broken down into four categories with combinations of these four categories comprising the six main licenses.  The first is attribution, in which the creator lets others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work and derivative works based upon it, but only if they give credit the way the creator requests. The second is share alike, in which the creator allows others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.  The third is noncommercial, in which the creator allows others to copy, distribute, display, and perform your work, and derivative works based upon it, but for noncommercial purposes only.  The fourth is no derivative works, in which the creator allows others to copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

    As a teacher I look for attribution and noncommercial works when I am searching for creative commons works because they are the easiest for me to work with and I enjoy having the option of modifying the work. 

    My personal experience with copyright issues has been varied, from using Napster in the 90’s to figuring out what the bit torrent is about to having my students research copyright before completing too many Photoshop, Flash, and web design projects.  As an avid slashdot.org follower I have read many articles and comments on copyright issues, many articles talking about someone getting in trouble for copyright infringement and comments talking about how the material should be free for anyone to acquire and/or use.  Personally I understand how an artist, whether it be a musician or a program developer, should make money from the product they create but I also find it hard to argue with those that say there are works of art that should be free to everyone to use.  I do not have any specific examples of the later right now, but I am sure the slashdot.org archives contain examples.

    In the classroom, which is my daily work and usually my nightly, I use creative commons works as well as copyrighted textbooks and workbooks.  Since I teach six different courses there are all sorts of examples I could give for everything from Accounting to Web Design, but depending on the course I use information from the current textbook I am using (Accounting) or create examples of my own that allow students to see what is possible (Web Design).  In web design I tend to use my own images but there have been times when I have searched for images with a creative commons license as well as music with the same type of licensing.

    I encourage my students to do the same thing.  They always have a hard time believing that they are not supposed to use the newest hip-hop song they bought on iTunes for presentations and having them research copyright issues is usually an eye opener for them.  I have found that music is most often the place where students will break, or come close to it, copyright laws but this is easily remedied after having them research copyright and showing them multiple websites that contain loads of music with a creative commons license.  I also hope next year to have a room full of iMacs and would love to show students how to make their own music selections with GarageBand!