Copyright Primer
Fair Use Copyright Quiz
by Hall Davidson
Basically, copyright law was created in this country to protect individuals and companies from having their work ripped off.
The owner of the local Blockbuster Video store supports the school by donating one videotape rental-free to the school every Friday. The video is shown in the multi-purpose room to reward students with perfect attendance that week. It does improve attendance. This falls under "fair use".
A teacher buys a single-user program with department money and puts it on the Local Area Network (LAN) . It is frequently used by several teachers at the same time. This is done in violation of a written district policy against using single-user programs on the LAN. After two years, the software company takes action against the individual teacher. The district is also liable.
The Adobe user license allows ten versions of PageMaker to be spread across twenty-five machines as long as no more than ten users ever use the program simultaneously.
On her home VCR, a history teacher taped the original ABC news report of Nixon leaving the White House after resigning. She uses the entire news program every year in her classroom. This is fair use.
St. Francis school purchases a single copy of a math program and installs it on the server so it can be accessed by classrooms throughout the school and also on the stand-alone computers in the portables. The policy is that only one class can use it at a time and the policy is religiously enforced. This use is permissible.
A teacher rents Gone With the Wind to show the burning of Atlanta scene to her class while studying the Civil War. This is fair use.
Asking for permission is key to fair use protection in education.
An elementary teacher in California loves the cartoon demonstration of fractions in the TV program Mathworks. He copies the entire program for every teacher in the school. This is fair use.
Using a legal copy of the program Webwhacker, a district technology specialist downloads and caches educational and non-educational web pages for school Internet trainings. This is fair use.
A science teacher asks the school librarian to record a great episode of Reading Rainbow on its original broadcast on 3/02. He figures on using it for years. His students digitize parts for a HyperStudio class project. This is okay.
A student finds a photo online dramatizing a pre-Columbian Viking landing in America. Since the school symbol is the Viking, he posts this photo on the school web page. It links back to the original website. This is fair use.
A student doing a multimedia report copies the Quicktime movie of Kennedy's "We shall go to the moon" speech from the CD-ROM Groliers Encyclopedia. Her teacher posts the project on the school LAN. This is fair use.
A school purchases a typing tutorial program and houses it in the library. It is checked out to students to take home. By enforced policy, the homes erase the program at the end of the two week checkout period. Permissible?
A student building a multimedia art project uses copyrighted images of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings downloaded from the web. He submits this project to the California Student Multimedia Festival (and others) honoring classroom work and wins the $1,000 prize for the school. This is permissible under fair use.
The teacher of the winning multimedia project mentioned above shows it at an art conference for educators. It cost $50 to attend the conference and the teacher is awarded free attendance because he is a presenter. This is fair use.
A health teacher tapes a Seinfeld episode on personal hygiene for use the following week in class. The local television station denies permission when asked and states this is a violation of copyright law. They are correct.
A student brings in a cassette copy of the National Anthem which he copied from an audio CD his mother purchased at Target. Another student on her team digitizes this into a HyperStudio stack and video. This is fair use.
From MP3.com, a gifted student downloads an MP3 music file of a hit rap song for an anti-violence video his team made. This is fair use.
A high school sells a student video yearbook made by volunteers for $25 to raise money for equipment for the school. They use popular music clips. The money all goes to the school. The songs are fully listed in the credits. This is fair use.
A school can only afford one copy of KidPix. It loads this onto the library computer and all students and all classes have access to it all day. The teachers copy and install KidPix Player on their classroom computers to evaluate the student work. This is permissible.
A teacher creates his own grading program. He transfers to another school and forgets to delete the program from the network. Everyone at his old school copies and use the program. He sues the school and wins. He is likely to receives a significant monetary reward.
A teacher with Internet connection in her classroom pays for only one Internet account to AskMeThings, a dot com. The teacher lets every student use it. This is permissible.
An enterprising media aid tapes 60 Minutes every week in case teachers need it. This is fair use.
A professor at a University of California campus copies an expensive software program for every student in class to use. If taken to court by the copyright holder, the university will certainly lose.
Bonus Question:
Copyright protection is essential for superior artistic output.
There are divergent points of view on copyright under the law. Two points of view can be found in two excellent books, available on Amazon.com. The Illustrated Story of Copyright (Samuels), and The Nature of Copyright: A Law of Users’ Rights (Patterson, Lindberg).
Another copyright/fair use quiz by Hall Davidson is available at: http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/10/copyright_quiz.html
More information and great links on copyright may be found at www.halldavidson.net. This Quiz may be reproduced (with attribution) for educational purposes.
Thanks to http://www.ifla.org/documents/infopol/copyright/ipmyths.htm for the Bonus Question.
This interactive quiz was adapted from:
The
Copyright Primer: Fair Use Copyright Quiz
http://www.mediafestival.org/quiz1.pdf
http://www.mediafestival.org/answ1.pdf
© 2002 Hall Davidson. Used with permission.