Are You Playing Fair?

I wasn't concerned about copyright infringement until I got an email from my administration that stated that if I didn't remove a photo from my class website, they or I would be fined. My department head received a similar email about his website. We were a little clueless I have to say. And we were very lucky that we were given the courtesy of being allowed to rectify the situation.

I am not a lawyer, but I think I have a pretty good grasp on copy right law for teachers now.  You'll be happy to know that under the copyright law the Fair Use Clause 107 states that educators and students can show and reproduce copyrighted materials for educational purposes.  All  government sites or work that government employees create while doing government work and materials older than 1923 are completely fair game to photocopy and distribute even if you are not a teacher. You are permitted to show movies (if you don't reproduce a copy), hand out articles, passages of books, and play music recordings. It doesn't matter if you or your school owns the movie, or you use your personal Netflix account, as long as you don't charge admission.  And if you have any indication that a website owner might not want you to photocopy parts of their site, you are allowed to just direct students to the site on their own.

Where you would run into trouble is using images that are copyrighted, then posting them to the open internet like I did.  If you have a pass worded student site you are fine.  It's the dissemination on the open internet that will cause you trouble. And it makes sense that photocopying and distributing texts, including single chapters, or workbooks that students are supposed to purchase for your class is illegal because you are taking money away from the copy right holder.  Internet homework sites make it very easy to distribute these materials illegally. You may not use copyrighted material for profit or plagiarize (claiming work as your own) which is more of a problem for our students.

Here is a government site if you want to read more about Fair Use.

If you happen to have a blog where you include images found on the internet, you may want to read this article about the outrageous fines imposed by companies or individuals who run image search programs 24 hours a day.  These can be from $200 to $150,000.  Scary!