The July issue of eSchoolNews contains a headline article “Copyright: Can it hold knowledge hostage?” The articles takes its direction from an Annenberg School of Communication conference entitled Knowledge Held Hostage.
We emphasize student created multimedia products as a way for students to explore and process course content. When these projects were based in a physical location (e.g., a classroom, a school), existing “fair use” guidelines apply. You can use “small amounts” of material (text, music, images) within an educational multimedia product stored on a classroom computer. However, posting that same product to the Internet changes the rules. Works on the Internet are regarded as “publications” and are governed by the same rules that apply to commercial publication. This changed to some extent with the “TEACH Act.” The TEACH Act was enacted to allow on-line classes to provide similar experiences to face-to-face classes. For example, as a classroom instructor, I can take a small amount of material (e.g., a graph from the textbook) and display this material in class as part of a lecture. An on-line instructor would probably now be allowed to scan a graph from the textbook and post the image with comments on the web as long as access was limited to students from the instructor’s class.
The focus of the TEACH Act leaves unclear what students are allowed to create and post and whom would be allowed to review this material (e.g., parents).
Crews and Law analysis of the TEACH Act.
Indiana University – Purdue checklist of TEACH Act compliance.
Writing about legal matters is tricky. The best advice is probably to understand the punch line from the joke about the baseball umpire – “it ain’t nothing until I call it.” Laws are vague and comments about laws are closer to “opinions” than anything else. Court action often ends up defining what laws mean.
I am very interested in those willing to give their “opinion” regarding what content students are allowed to post.
