CD ROM Copyright

Mulitmedia, such as CD-ROM and Copyright

Using multimedia works, such as CD-ROM in student multimedia projects without violating copyright laws. Multimedia used to be motion pictures because movies have always incorporated pictures with text and/or sound. But today, multimedia also incorporates digitized work. The Multimedia Copyright protection site, http://iac.co.jp/~psi/multicpy.htm, defines multimedia as, “'A digital medium combining sound, image and text, in fact data of every kind, and involving a certain amount of interactivity, a software application allowing navigation, to a varying extent, between the various types of data'”. Multimedia used to come in the form of books, cassette tapes, photographs, phonorecording, etc. which required huge storage space and troublesome shipment. Through digital encoding, or transforming something into a long sequence of bits that can be read by a computer, storage and shipping (copying) has been greatly reduced in space and cost.

It used to be that a man came to your door and sold you a huge set of encyclopedia so that your children could do research for school. For your child to use an article with pictures, s/he either photocopied all or part of the article and/or picture or copied the contents by hand. Now you can get Grolier’s Deluxe 2 CD-ROM set encyclopedia for $59.95 and you don’t even have to buy a huge bookshelf. And if your child wants to use an article for a school report, s/he doesn’t even have to read it to highlight it and copy it into a word processor then print it out, pictures and all and even in color! Digital encoding has changed our world and it’s wreaking havoc with Copyright laws.

In the meantime, we as educators need to be informed so that we do not unknowingly violate any copyright laws thereby infringing upon someone else’s work. Ignorance is no defense in court and your school won’t like being sued. This is especially tricky nowadays since it’s so easy to take multimedia that we did not create and place it, in part or in whole, on a web page of our creation, or publish a student’s work that includes multimedia from a copyrighted source. It is safest, and most legally correct, to assume that everything we come across on the Internet, every software we buy, floppy or CD, is copyrighted and it doesn’t even have to say it is. And as more schools get networked, distributing multimedia through your LAN is easier than walking a book over to the next building, heck next door!

Creating a multimedia work for distribution by companies is no easy task. Take a look at the For Multimedia Developers site, http://www.p-law.com//wong_dir/docs/wongpap1.html, and you’ll see that copyright laws make it difficult for developers to make a CD-ROM without violating or infringing upon someone else’s work. Permissions need to be acquired and royalties paid before something like that can be sold on the open market legally so they make sure we, the consumer, realize that their product(s) is copyrighted by providing all sorts of licenses that delineate how we can use said product. Luckily, we are educators and we use other people’s multimedia content for non-profit educational use. Such use is protected under fair use law. Fair use can be defined as, “Section 107 of the Copyright Act sets forth the four fair use factors which should be considered in each instance, based on particular facts of a given case, to determine whether a use is a "fair use":

(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, and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

“ From the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia, http://www.libraries.psu.edu/avs/fairuse/guidelinedoc.html, put together by a group of publishers, authors and educators which was accepted by the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary, and the U. S. House of Representatives, on September 27, 1996. It is not a legal document but contains the guidelines that publishers, authors and educators agreed upon. Just from that, which still leaves a lot to individual interpretation, we see that educators can reproduce sections of copyrighted materials for school as long as we don’t use the whole work and as long as the creator of the work doesn’t lose any money from our reproduction. Under fair use, one of the Fair Use Guidelines for Multimedia, http://www.libraries.psu.edu/avs/fairuse/guidelinedoc.html, for students states that, “Students may incorporate portions of lawfully acquired copyrighted works when producing their own educational multimedia projects for a specific course,” and educators for Curriculum-Based Instruction, “...may incorporate portions of lawfully acquired copyrighted works when producing their own educational multimedia programs for their own teaching tools in support of curriculum-based instructional activities at educational institutions.” Furthermore, “Students may perform and display their own educational multimedia projects...” “...for educational uses in the course for which they were created and may use them in their own portfolios as examples of their academic work for later personal uses such as job and graduate school interviews.” “Educators may perform and display their own educational multimedia projects...” “for curriculum-based instruction to students in the following situations:

1. for face-to-face instruction,
2. assigned to students for directed self-study,
3. for remote instruction to students enrolled in curriculum-based courses and located at remote sites, provided over the educational institution's secure electronic network in real-time, or for after class review or directed self-study, provided there are technological limitations on access to the network and educational multimedia project (such as a password or PIN) and provided further that the technology prevents the making of copies of copyrighted material.”

So under fair use we as educators may have cause to use copyrighted material without permission to make a web site for locally (LAN) or outside of our school (WAN) to provide students off-site access. I take it that this does not mean that we can use someone else’s multimedia for a class web page when that web page is used as information for parents, students and staff. It doesn’t seem like that would fly there. But, such use can be done with the author’s or creator’s or publisher’s written permission. We have to ask permission in writing and receive a yes in writing. From the Copyright Law in the Electronic Environment, http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/IntellectualProperty/faculty.htm#mm, Summary of Multimedia Fair Use Guidelines we find that: “Students may incorporate others' works into their multimedia creations and perform and display them for academic assignments, Faculty may incorporate others' works into their multimedia creations

- to create multimedia curriculum materials
- to teach remote classes where access and total number of students is limited; - technology makes copying impossible
- if materials can be copied, they may only be made available remotely (by network) for 15 days and then must be placed on reserve for on-site (at the remote location) use only.
- Faculty may demonstrate their multimedia creations at professional symposia and retain same
- in their own portfolios
- Time limit on fair use: 2 years from completion of the multimedia work
- Copies limit: generally, only 2, but joint work creators may each have a copy
- Portion limits:
- motion media
- up to 10% or 3 minutes, whichever is less
- text
- up to 10% or 1000 words, whichever is less
- poem
- up to 250 words, but further limited to:
- three poems or portions of poems by one poet; or
- five poems or portions of poems by different poets from an anthology
- music
- up to 10% or 30 seconds, whichever is less
- photos and images
- up to 5 works from one author; up to 10% or 15 works,
- whichever is less, from a collection
- database information
- up to 10% or 2500 fields or cell entries, whichever is less.”

The quotes I used from above fall under fair use but I infringed one of the site’s creators as they freely gave permission for their site to be used, as long as it was used in its entirety so that all reading the information would get all of it and not just pieces. I feel that the parts I chose were okay and not an infringement because they are the laws that can be found in many places and actually fall under public domain being part of the government. Whew!

Another site to see the above information in a slightly different light, is the Highlights of the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/avs/fairuse/fairhigh.html. The summary of multimedia fair use from the Copyright Law in the Electronic Environment seemed much more detailed to clarify what the guidelines before it left in question. It’s almost too detailed and from now on, I’m going to worry every time I go to that copy machine, much less find that perfect graphic on the web. At least on the web it’s easy enough to find an email address to write to for permission. From Now On’s 1996 article on Keeping it Legal: Questions arising out of Web Site Management, http://fromnowon.org/jun96/legal.html#Clip Art, a perfect case was presented to show how copyright affects use of CD-ROM material. Basically, the case in point asks if it’s legal for students to use animal pictures from a CD of clip art which was purchased by the school on the school's web site? The answer is that it depends on what the license information says that came with the CD-ROM package. Some package’s clearly state that the many pictures and images are for use in making your own web pages. Other’s like Microsoft’s Works pretty much states that all you paid for was to use the software on your one computer and that you can’t do much of anything with any part of the program or any of the, “images, photographs, animations, video, audio, music, and text incorporated in the software,” becaused it’s all owned by Microsoft, conveniently called, “COMPANY.” We as educators have quite a bit of leeway and we can use multimedia in our lessons and even publish student work that has multimedia in it, but we have limits and we have to abide by them. And just as everything we see pretty much is copyrighted, everything we create is protected by copyright law whether we write it on our work or not. And everything our students create is protected by copyright law, so they must have parent permission (if under 18) to publish their work on the WWW. To make it legal, all we need to do is add the copyright symbol, ©, the year of first publication, and name of the copyright holder (no last names for kids) and we’re protected without having to register and pay $20.