Copyright & Fair Use

Copyright and Fair Use in School

Grade level: 6, 7, and/or 8

Project Objectives:
Teach the students about Fair Use and how it benefits us, at the same time instilling in them an appreciation for copyright and why Fair Use should not be abused.

Learning activities (teacher component):
The teacher needs to be acquainted with Copyright as it affects education especially where Fair Use is concerned.

Instructional Activities (student component):
Start with a class discussion about sharing your private property.
Lead discussion to intellectual property.
Show the Fair Use guidelines and maybe some Copyright law. For this an overhead projector or computer with an LT viewer to display it on a TV or even just a black or white board prepared ahead of time is needed.
In a computer lab, have students pair up to answer some questions on four web sites, three that the teacher chose (this could vary depending on the individual teacher). Follow-up by having students share their results in class.

Instructional Strategies:
The beginning, motivating, discussion may last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half depending on how much the class gets into it.
Spend about an hour in the computer with maybe some time for follow-up. Ending discussion/sharing should take from half an hour to a full hour depending on if everyone pair gets a chance to share.

Student Activities:
Teacher will begin by engaging students in a whole class discussion about private property and sharing. Lead students to come to an agreement that sharing your private property is good, but that those who borrow it should take care of it, treating it like it’s not theirs, and return it in good condition and promptly. Next, lead students into a discussion of intellectual property. Should we treat intellectual property like we do tangible property? Should we share intellectual property? Does it need to be treated with the same respect as tangible items? Does it need to be returned? If the students do not think that intellectual property deserves the same respect as tangible property, ask them if that would change if it was their parent’s intellectual property and those who took it and passed it along to other people cost their parents money? That would mean less money, food, whatever for them because someone did not respect intellectual property.

Have ready on the board, where students couldn’t see it during the discussion, or on an overhead, or on the computer to be projected or shown on TV, the four Fair Use guidelines. Have students read each guideline and go through another volley of whole class discussion. Distinguish between using material for a printed, classroom report or for publishing on a web page or a newsletter. For the latter, explicit, written permission is needed from the copyright owner. If the copyright owner is not known then that material cannot be published because the site it is found in is infringing upon someone else’s copyrighted material.

Follow-up: Walk kids through answering copyright/fair use questions about some sites you researched, then let them pick one site of their own to answer the same questions about. They should do this in pairs for support.

Pixelator’s free graphics, obviously free provided that you make a link back to them. How do they make money, the ads.

The Disney site, may be or may not be obvious but it has a link at the bottom of the page for legal restrictions. Halfway down the page it states, “No material from DISNEY.COM or any Web site owned, operated, licensed, or controlled by DISNEY may be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way, except that you may download one copy of the materials on any single computer for your personal, non-commercial home use only, provided you keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices.” A clearly hands-off page.

Bill Nye the Science Guy’s Nye-Labs page. No information on main page so not obvious. So what can we assume? It’s all copyrighted, it’s a business. Write for permission before using any part of it. I checked the info page, then the sponsor page and no copyright info provided. One of the sponsors is Disney and we know they rules so it’s safe to assume that the sponsor’s limitations extend to Nye-labs.

Click here to view a copy of the questionnaire.

Have students share their findings back in class.

Project Assessment:
The sharing of results will show if students understand that if a web site has copyright information or no mention of whether or not anything on the site is, “for the taking,” that site should be respected. If working on a report that will be printed out for class use only, that is acceptable usage under fair use, but if it’s for publication on a web page or a newsletter, material from the web site in question cannot be used without explicit, written permission from the copyright owner.

Project References:
Definition of Intellectual Property.

Definition of what can be copyrighted.

Intellectual Property in the Net.

What is Fair Use?

Multimedia Fair Use Guidelines

Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia

Using portions of multimedia works

A multimedia case for discussion.