Copyrights in the Classroom
January 6, 2010 in Academia by Nick Pernisco
A friend of mine recently presented at the K12 Online Conference on the issue of copyrights in the classroom. I thought I would expand on this, and discuss how copyrights come into play in college and university classrooms.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what is acceptable in regards to using copyrighted materials, and what isn’t. As someone who deals with copyright issues on a daily basis, both in the role of college professor and as founder and executive producer of Carmelina Films, I feel a responsibility to dispel the myths surrounding copyrights, and to ensure that other people’s copyrights are being respected.
Although I’m not a lawyer, I do believe I understand when it’s OK to use copyrighted material, and when it isn’t.
Reading materials
There seems to be an overriding belief that reading material used for instruction is safe to copy and use freely. Some teachers photocopy news articles and pass them out to students. And some go as far as putting copyrighted material online for anyone to download.
This, like most areas of copyright, is a gray area. Although copyrighted material is generally not supposed to be copied and used without the author’s permission, copyright law in the US allows for some exceptions under fair use. There are conditions that must be met for something to fall under the fair use doctrine, and these conditions are intentionally vague.
For example, let’s say your class is having a discussion on the possibility of finding a vaccine for HIV. Then, let’s say, you find an article about a research group who may have had some success in testing their HIV vaccine. Is it OK to photocopy the article and pass it out in class to have a discussion? From my understanding, this is permissible under fair use. Can you save the article as a PDF and upload it to your own website, making it available to students and anyone else who comes along? Probably not.
Using existing sound or video in school projects
The use of music and video in school projects is probably the most misunderstood part of copyright in education. Can a teacher use a clip of their favorite song or movie in a class video or to show to the class? Ready for the answer? Yes and no.
Yes, if the teacher is trying to illustrate a point he or she is making about the topic at hand. Let’s say you’re discussing the way advertisers use sex to sell everything from clothing to food. You can show a TV commercial illustrating your point, but only as much as is needed to prove the point. The same goes for in-class movies. You can show a movie clip (or clips) that relate to the main point of your discussion, but you can’t show the whole thing, and you can’t just play a video with no relevance or just as a “reward”.
No, you shouldn’t show more than is needed to prove your point. The fair use doctrine DOES NOT specify a minimum or maximum number of seconds, bars of song, or scenes in a movie you can or can’t show. But the material must be relevant to your instruction, and it must not replace or take away from the market of the film or song. So you can use a short clip of that Green Day song to prove your point about political activism in modern pop music, but you can’t use it as the background music for your in-class editing project. This is also why you can’t show a whole movie as a reward – after seeing the movie in class, students now don’t have to go out and buy it or rent it, effectively taking away from the film’s market.
Citing sources in papers
When doing academic research, it’s important to cite your source material. Not only are you plagiarizing the work if you don’t cite your source, but you’re also infringing on copyrighted material. The fair use doctrine allows for inclusion of copyrighted material in works of criticism or analysis, but again, only enough to make your point, and only if it is clearly distinguished from your own work. Putting quotation marks around the sourced work, along with a citation somewhere in the paper, is usually enough to distinguish the original work from your own.
Conclusion
As you can see, using copyrighted works in the classroom can be frustrating, and it can cause confusion when trying to figure out if you’re using something legally or not. As with all things related to copyright, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Although you probably won’t go to jail for copyright infringement, your school can be sued and fined, and you can get into trouble.
If you’re looking for materials you CAN use in your classroom with minimal copyright hassle, look into using works in the public domain, or works licensed under the Creative Commons license (like the image in this post).
As a reminder, I’m not a lawyer, so do your own research before deciding if it’s OK to use copyrighted material.
