What follows is an informative email with sources shown:
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What follows is an informative email with sources shown:
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| Sent | Saturday, June 7, 2003 8:10 pm |
| To | CHEMED-L@MAILER.UWF.EDU |
| Cc | |
| Bcc | |
| Subject | Re: High school student presentations and copyright |
| On 06/07/2003
01:06 PM, Lee Amosslee wrote: > > On a similar theme, how about those high school computer > presentations? > > How many of us have students show PowerPoint(c) and other > presentations with obviously "pirated" images (and worse, text). For > decades students have produced projects using images cut out of > magazines and other resources. Most teachers accepted this; the > students had to have bought the magazine (hopefully not cut out from > the library copy!). Some ask for origonal drawings only. > > Now comes the internet, color printers, and computer projectors. > > (Our student newspaper even thought they could just download pictures > off the internet and print them in the paper! They said "But we > credited "Internet photo.") > > I think this is another opportunity for us to educate our students > about laws: "No, items on the internet are not necessarily in public > domain." "You must cite all your sources, including web address for > web documents." There are several ideas on the table here. These include plagiarism, improper attribution, and unauthorized copying. Let's discuss them separately: 1) Plagiarism: The student is clearly not guilty of plagiarism, because he's not trying to pass the photo off as his own work. 2) Attribution: Alas, the attribution is not detailed enough to lead others to the same source, nor to make authors feel they are getting proper credit. For a beginning student, I would deduct only fractional points for this, but I would expect better next time. Note that proper attribution is one of the rights protected by copyright, whether or not it was permissible to make a copy. 3) Copying: Depending on details, the student might be in good shape, under the "Fair Use" doctrine. You can copy something to the extent necessary for scholarly analysis and criticism. It's a murky area, but the limiting cases are easy enough to understand: -- If the student just scoops up an entire article and uncritically hands it in, this is (in the absence of a license) unauthorized copying. [Citing the source has no bearing on this point; that's a separate issue covered in the previous two points.] -- At the other extreme, suppose the student says "I found this picture in reference [1] which makes a really interesting point, namely blah blah blah, and even though many other sources say just the opposite (including the encyclopedia [2] and our textbook [3]), I find the argument in reference [1] completely convincing, for the following reasons...." In that case, IANAL but that sure sounds like Fair Use to me. The key considerations are *) Scholarly analysis and criticism is occuring, and *) The copying was no more than necessary to permit the analysis and criticism. -- Returning to the bad extreme: If the student uses the exact same picture as a wall decoration, just because it's a cute picture, then that's not Fair Use. > Now, we probably don't want authors to be inundated with requests > from thousands of high school students each spring requesting > permission to use their image in their classroom presentation. ... which largely explains why the Fair Use doctrine was established. > Copyright law is clearly bent all the time in K-12. How many of us > have ever been in a school where *nothing* was ever photocopied for a > class without permission? Is this against the law? Probably some/most > of it. Will it ever stop? Probably not. Do we have a professional > responsibility to minimize it? Certainly. I agree. As the saying goes, it's not just a good idea, it's the law. And vice versa. The legal penalties for willful copyright infrinement are quite severe. And don't think you'll get a pass because you did it in the line of work. Your school will say what you did was against their policy, and they won't lift a finger to defend you. By way of analogy, imagine what would happen if you got a speeding ticket while driving a school vehicle. It is YOU who gets the ticket, not the school. But let's forget about the legalities for a moment. I want to argue that copyright infringement is a bad idea, quite apart from the legalities. People may think they are saving money. But let's get real. Authors need to get paid. If everybody is copying stuff without paying royalties, it drives writers out of business; everything will be written by amateurs... and a lot of stuff won't get written at all. You can't have a situation where authors get paid but nobody (or almost nobody) does any paying. This problem is already manifest in the area of educational software. There's a lot that could be done, but programmers shy away from the whole area, because they're afraid they won't get paid, because teachers are such notorious infringers. So rather than saving money, the habit of piracy has raised the price to infinity: certain things are not available at any price. |