Passing Copyright Info on from David

In response to the recent discussion about copyright, generally speaking student use comes under the Fair Use Guidelines of the copyright law. "Fair Use" allows limited copying, distribution, and display of copyrighted works without the author?s permission under certain conditions

Here is the text of the Fair Use Statute of the U.S. Copyright Act, Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976: Limitations on exclusive rights/Fair use.

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The Fair Use Statute

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified in 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.

Copyright law does not specify the exact limitation of fair use. Instead, the law provides four interrelated standards or tests, which must be applied in each case to evaluate whether the copying or distributing falls within the limited exemption of fair use.

These are the four Fair Use standards:

1.The purpose and character of the use.

Duplicating and distributing selected portions of copyrighted materials for specific educational purposes falls within fair use guidelines, particularly if the copies are made spontaneously, for temporary use, and not as part of an anthology.

2. The nature of the copyrighted work.

Fair use applies more readily to copying paragraphs from a primary source than to copying a chapter from a textbook. Fair use applies to multimedia materials in a manner similar if not identical to print media.

3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.

Copying extracts that are short relative to the whole work and distributing copyrighted segments that do not capture the "essence" of the work are generally considered fair use.

4. The effect of use on the potential market for or value of the work.

If copying or distributing the work does not reduce sales of the work, then the use may be considered fair. Of the four standards, this is arguably the most important test for fair use.

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Following the "fair use" guidelines, segments of copyrighted electronic and multimedia materials may be captured, copied, digitized, transformed to another medium, or manipulated for educational purposes.

If any student goes on to try to make money (sell advertising space, for example) with their blog, then there would be a problem. But classwork is generally accepted as "fair use."