Instructify

I ran across a great example of fair use in education that I wanted to share because it teaches us a lot about one type of situation where you can use copyrighted photos, and illuminates the thought process/procedures for working out whether something is fair use and how to document it.

The Wikipedia entry on Anne Frank features the famous picture of her that we all know well.

When you are using photos from Wikipedia, it’s always a good idea to go to the image page. You get there by clicking on the picture. It will let you know what licensing the picture has, and how to credit it. You should always look at this page before you copy a picture from Wikipedia. The one for Anne Frank’s photo is interesting. Let’s take a look:

1. Now we see that photo is copyrighted but unlicensed. This means it’s not “registered” but that makes no difference about whether it is “protected”.
2. They are using it under Fair Use because no free equivalent is available, it shows the subject, and it’s being used for educational purposes.
3. Someone is telling the uploader (the person who put it up and wrote that rationale), that they did not put up enough information, and lists what is missing.

This illustrates what steps Wikipedia wants contributors to go through to document fair use, and is a good lesson in what you might want to do if you are making a fair use of copyrighted material on your Website at school. -ALICE MERCER

Related Stuff:

Copyright in education, part 1: Fair use

Copyright in education, part 2: Transformative use

Being educators, we are often conservative, especially when it involves the law, as copyright does. This has led to a growing concern about missed learning opportunities due to caution because teachers are avoiding doing anything with copyrighted materials, or not allowing their students to produce content using copyrighted material.

American and Temple Universities have been working on this and have a report coming out about the cost of copyright confusion in education. I recently attended a session at NECC given by Kristen Hokanson on this topic. This discussion brought up a concept that is really central to educational use of copyrighted material, and that is transformation. A big part of what makes it fair use is that you’re not just “copying” the work of others, but remaking it into something of your own. One of the best examples is the Fair(y) Use Tale video produced by Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. This video takes snippets from Disney cartoons to teach about fair use. Because it’s both education AND satire, it’s covered by fair use.

I was first introduced to this concept when I did a case-study discussion (a favorite way for lawyers to discuss and educate about legal points) about a potential fair use I had in a classroom project. Transformation is not often discussed, but it’s an important concept for fair use.  Get to know more about it. -ALICE MERCER

Transformative use resources

Stanford University guide to Fair Use in Education check out the section on the “transformative factor”

Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Fair(y) Use Tale

It’s Elementary: Copyright–It’s the Law

Related Stuff:

Copyright in education, part 1: Fair use

Photo credit: PugnoM on flickr

This site, and others, feature lots of great places for your students to create content, and to locate materials like audio, photos, and videos to mashup, or include in their own creations. We have reviewed sites that have photos that have a creative commons license, but what if the picture or audio clip you want to use is copyrighted (not in the public domain, or licensed in Creative Commons)? Now we’re going to talk about legal concepts, but since we aren’t lawyers (we just may pretend we are in our classrooms), this is not legal advice, yahda, yahda…

First the good news: there is a legal concept called “Fair Use” that allows educators to use snippets of copyrighted material. Fair Use applies to educators, journalist, and satirists (us and Jon Stewart, yipee!). It says you can use copyrighted materials, BUT the use is governed by these four principles:

1. Purpose and character of the use - Why are you using this material?
2. Nature of the material - In what form are you using the material?
3. Amount of the portion used - How much of the original work are you using?
4. Effect on the potential market - Does your use hurt the original owner financially(1)

Now the not-so-good news. Naturally enough, the law on this is purposefully vague to leave it up to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis. I know it’s never been my dream to be a Supreme Court test case (maybe a nightmare). Because of this, there have been two responses by educators, we play it safe and avoid the use of copyright protected materials, and/or we have come up with some “rules of thumb” to guide our use of copyrighted materials (e.g. you can use 10 seconds but not more than 10% of copyrighted audio, you can excerpt a paragraph from a chapter, etc.).

I’m going to finish up this article with a list of some guides that give some rules of thumb, but I will be following up with another piece about different approaches to this copyright conundrum. -ALICE MERCER

(1) Tony Jongejan’s Presentation on Copyright at NECC 2008 - Where I got the principles listed above

TechLearning Copyright Guideline for Administrators - A guide with a handy-dandy chart from Hall Davidson

Related Stuff:

Download Free Copyrighted Books with WOWIO. Yes, it’s Legal.