Copyright and Fair Use

I chose to read The Educator’s Guide to Copyright and Fair Use, and take the quiz from the Illinois Community College Board. This article explained copyright and fair use in the classroom, and gave a corresponding quiz at the end to test your understanding based on what you had just read.

The first two quiz items I want to talk about are quiz numbers two and three. Two states it is a violation of copyright law for a technology coordinator to distribute a program through the school’s server. This is false that it is legal for the technology coordinator to do this, however quiz item number three says it is not okay to install a newer version of a program on all computers in the school when they only bought five copies. My question would be is what is the difference here? How come it is okay for the coordinator to distribute a program through the server, but not okay for the teacher in question three to distribute it one computer at a time? Similar to these two quiz item is quiz item number 5, the item states that it is fair use for the teacher to make several copies of a software so that all students may have access to it. The correct answer to this would be False, because “the number of students who can use a software program simultaneously is restricted to the number of copies the school owns.” If we look back to number two, the technology coordinator only had one copy, but he was able to distribute it through the school’s server. The first question that comes to mind is, how does the guy with one copy get to distribute it to more people than the guy with what sounds like more than one copy?

The next two questions I found to be a little bit contradictory were quiz items six and seven. Item six states that it is fair use for a teacher to download pictures and info on marine bio and place them in a folder for her students to look at. The answer to this is true, however you cannot repost it back to the internet without the source's permission. Item seven states it is okay for teachers to post student work on a private website, even if they used copyrighted material without permission. The answer to this is true, because the website would be private. However, I feel that nothing is truly private on the internet anymore. What if somebody cracks your password and it becomes public because they share your password online? You are then responsible for sharing copyrighted material without permission on the web. The last item that I would like to talk about is quiz item number eleven. It stated that it is fair use for a teacher to video tape an old TV show so that students may edit themselves in to make a parody of it. I answered false to this question because in my opinion it didn’t sound right that students should be able to take original clips of a show, add themselves into it, and then pass it off as their own creation. I felt this way because you would still technically have parts from the original show in your product. However, it turns out I was wrong and the correct answer was true, and I still don’t completely understand why. Overall, I found that some of the answers were contradictory, which was frustrating. It seemed like it was the slightest differences that were taking a fair use situation to a non fair use situation.

As I’ve come to find out this is a very complex thing, I feel as though one little thing could influence whether it is fair use or not. For me as a teacher it will mean that I will just have to be that much more careful when it comes to using copyrighted materials. If I get caught using sources that are not sited correctly I could end up in big trouble with my school, and I wouldn’t be setting a very good example for my students.