This article demonstrates the importance of acknowledging work that you use in the instruction of your students by delineating copyright laws and giving examples of when a teacher may copy material to distribute to her students and when she may not do so.
The article lists four examples of what constitute "fair" usage of copyrighted material. These include (1) the purpose of the use; (2) the nature of the work (3) the amount of the work used in relation to the work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use on the market or potential income for the work.
Fair use is considered on a case-by-case basis, but some examples of fair use are teachers copying an article for distribution to her students or perhaps copying an article to use in planning a lesson for her upcoming class. An unfair use example is a teacher copying an entire textbook and distributing the copies to her students. This affects the author's source of income and is prohibited.
This is a great example of what is copyrighted and what is considered fair use of copyrighted material. It also delineates the various types of copyrighted material and should be consulted in order to better understand what a teacher can and cannot do in regards to using copyrighted material for her classroom.
Thompson, Kate A. Copyright 101. Learning and Leading with Technology, Vol 39. No. 7
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Thanks for you post Claudia! I enjoyed reading your summary, and I appreciate the insight you provided me with in regard to the basic idea of the article, being that I myself did not read this article. I feel that the article addressed a very important issue, an issue that needs to be discussed more often than it currently is. I believe that it is essential that as future educators, we begin to understand what is and is not reasonable, when it comes to using the work of others. I appreciate the examples given for both an appropriate use and an inappropriate use of another’s work and I also appreciated the four factors that were given in regard to determining whether or not the use of the work is “fair.” I believe those four factors or “questions” you might call them, could be of great benefit to teachers who weren’t sure whether or not they were breaking a law in doing what they were doing.
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