Copyright Law
How Does it Affect You, the Educator?
September 04, 2007
Copyright Law—
How Does it Affect You, the Educator?
Educators, public broadcasting and a few other groups have a different set of guidelines than commercial and home users.
Guidelines, developed during the CONFU (Conference on Fair Use)
process include this Preamble:
Fair use is a legal principle that defines
the limitations on the exclusive rights of copyright holders. The
purpose of these guidelines is to provide guidance on the
application of fair use principles by educators, scholars and
students who develop multimedia projects using portions of
copyrighted works under fair use rather than by seeking
authorization for non-commercial educational uses. These guidelines
apply only to fair use in the context of copyright and to no other
rights.
There is no simple test to determine what
is fair use. Section 107 of the Copyright Act sets forth the four
fair use factors which should be considered in each instance, based
on particular facts of a given case, to determine whether a use is
a "fair use": (1) the purpose and character of use, including
whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit
educational purposes, (2) the nature of the copyrighted work, (3)
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to
the copyrighted work as a whole, and (4) the effect of the use upon
the potential market for or value of the copyrighted
work.
The Fair
Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia provide for specific
time limitations, specific copying and distributions limitations,
and specific limits on the amount of copyrighted works that may be
used by educators. Examples:
• For motion media, up to 10% or 3 minutes, whichever is
less.
• For text, up to 10% or
1000 words, whichever is less.
• For poems, 1)
up to 250 words, 2) three poem
limit per poet, 3) five poem limit by different poets from an
anthology.
• For music, up to 10% or
30 seconds, whichever is less.
• For photos and
images , 1) up to 5 works
from one author, 2) up to 10% or 15 works, whichever is less, from
a collection.
• Database information, up
to 10% or 2,500 fields or cell entries, whichever is
less.
Learn
more about the Fair Use
Doctrine as it applies to YOU,
the EDUCATOR, in the “Fair Use Guidelines for Educational
Multimedia”, University of Texas Systems. http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/ccmcguid.htm
Or, Visit “Copyright Bay”
for an interactive tutorial on Fair Use
http://www.stfrancis.edu/cid/copyrightbay/
