Copyright and Fair Use

Website Reviews:

Teach Act – http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/teachact.htm

This website was helpful in that it outlined all of the conditions and requirements involved in the Teach Act for face-to-face and distance teaching. I also found the checklist at the end of the passage to be a great resource tool for any teacher. However, the website could have been more clearly written.

Copyright and Fair Use – http://www.umuc.edu/library/copy.shtml

I found this website to be both efficient and highly informative. It presented the ideas of copyright, fair use, and the Educational Multimedia Guidelines in an accessible and well organized manner. I liked the use of links and jumps in the website that allowed you to go directly to the question you want answered. Finally, the sample template of a request for permission letter is a great go-to reference for a teacher.

Copyright in the classroom – http://www.cyberbee.com/cb_copyright.swf

I think that this website would be a great tool for teaching students how to consider copyright when creating presentations, research papers, and other school projects. It is written in a format that students would understand and it covers the basics of copyright and fair use. I think that teachers would need to fill in the blanks when students ask more detailed questions.

Two Things that I knew:

I already knew the concepts of “copyright” and “attribution”. For many years I have written research papers and/or made presentations where I used quotes from copyrighted material that I then credited the source of that quote with a reference page and parenthetical documentation.

Two things that were new to me:

I did not know that there was a two year time limit to a multimedia project and I did not know that slogans cannot be copyrighted but are only protected by trademark laws.