Copyright

Copyright, Fair Use & Creative Commons Licenses...What Does It All Mean?

According to the United States Copyright office “Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S. code), to the authors of original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and certain other intellectual works” (2006). A creative commons license (CCL) "expands the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons) With a CCL it allows the creator to establish which rights they reserve and which rights they waive. Doing this allows others to build apon or improve the original work without getting in trouble. Fair use is refers to "the conditions under which you can use material that is copyrighted by someone else without paying royalities" (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=fair%20use).  

So what does all this mean? From my understanding copyright doesn't mean having a legal license. If it is YOUR original work; spoken or written, it is copyrighted. That means that virtually everything we see or hear is technically copyrighted. I was taught (in my younger days) that if you used another's work you needed to give credit. However, with the invention of the web and access to millions of documents sometimes finding a name to give credit to is impossible. As teachers we constantly research and incorporate others ideas into our classrooms. I know for me personally I use the internet a lot and I often don't show my students where my information came from. That's where fair use comes in. According to the 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law it states that the following situations are acceptable for use:

            Quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or

           comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for

            illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of

            the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief

 quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to

 replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a

small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or

judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel

or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.

I interoperate this to mean that as long as you are not reproducing one’s entire work, it is acceptable to use. CCL's are a new concept to me. In fact I hadn't heard of CCL's until the other day when I was messing around on Flickr. The author can set their CCL to varing degrees based on what they want to allow others to do to their work. There are four types of CCL's that I found at http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/.

1. Attribution: allows others to copy, distribute & display your work and deviate your work as they please as long as they credit you as the original creator.
2. Share alike: allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
3. Noncommercial: basically the same as attribution but for noncommercial purposes only.
4. No Derivative Works: allows others to copy, distribute and display your work only verbatim.

In my daily lessons, I tend to follow the rules of fair use. I never quote verbatim. I research and then rewrite what I've learned in order to teach my students. The only time I do use other's works is in my interior design class. I do use classic artworks to help teach certain concepts in design. Because I am an educator using these works in an educational setting this falls within the rules of fair use so I'm ok. When I have my students do research, however, I have them follow the rules of copyright. They are always required to site their sources and follow the guidelines for citing sources. As I mentioned before I don't have much experience with CCL's. I think if I really start to expand my lessons using Flickr then CCL may be something I will implement but for now I don't really see the need for it in my classroom.

 

Works Cited:

United States Copyright Office. Copyright [data set]. Retrieved from

            http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html