Blog Post #3 - Copyright & Fair Use

Copyright law is incredibly important to know as a teacher. It affects all multimedia shared in the classroom. According to the University of Maryland, "Copyright is a legal right, grounded in the United States Constitution, that gives the owner of copyright in a work the exclusive right to: reproduce the work, modify or prepare derivative works based on the work, distribute the work in any format by sale, pbublication, license, rental, or for free, publicly perform or display the work, and authorize others to exercise some of all of those rights." Copyright ensures the creator receives acknoledgement and payment for display or reproduction of the work. Copyright lasts for seventy years after the death of the creator, ninety-five years after publication or one hundred and twenty years from the date of creation, whichever expires first. Copyright applies to literary works, musicals including sound and recording, dramatic works, pantomimes and choreographic works, visual works, multimedia, software code and architectural works.

Section 107 of the Copyright Act states: "...the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research is not an infringement of copyright". Four factors must be considered in Fair Use.

1. What is the purpose of the use?

2. What is the nature of the work?

3. How much of the work will you use?

4. What effect will the use have on the market or potential arket value of the work?

As a teacher, it's important to note the author of all works in addition to teach students how to recognize and give credit to creators. In order to properly use created works, teachers can only recreate a classroom set of reproductions of the work for educational use. During COVID-19 and pandemic teaching, several publishers allowed teachers to reproduce works such as read alouds as long as the teacher housed the reproduction on a private link and credited the creators of the work. Although classroom sets can be created according to copyright, the law may need to be updated to consider 1:1 devices and how copyright plays in to electronic copies of created works. Teachers can use works in the public domain for any legal purpose without permission. Teachers can also access Creative Commons licenses of works to be shared in a variety of ways. Find out more information on Creative Commons licenses at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/