Copyright Law
 

Can anybody give me a quick summary of copyright law as it relates to the use of materials in the classroom. Or, more likely, let me know good web sources?

I'm not a lawyer, so don't rely entirely on what I've got to say, but here goes:

Using small portions of a work (a few pages from a novel, paragraphs from a short story, etc.) of a copyrighted work for classroom educational purposes should fall under the concept of "fair use," which means that you don't have to obtain permission from the copyright holder.

However, using large amounts of a single copyrighted work, or, in the case of smaller works such as a particular poem from an anthology, the entire work, is not covered by "fair use."

Keep in mind, though, that for many older works, the work itself might be in the public domain, even if the particular edition of it is not. For cases like this, such as Shakespeare, the way the work is presented (typeface, layout, pagination, etc.) is covered by copyright, even if the words themselves are not.

There's a lot of vagueness in the law, though, so there's room for all kinds of interpretation.

Here are some links that might help:
Fair Use Link
Public Domain Link

Thanks

If you need more assistance can you be more specific? What are you using and for what? There is a difference between print, video, and what they are being used for

Photocopying money so your grade three students can learn counting with money = BAD

Lesson learned by my friend, the teacher's assistant.

Well, I was giving a presentation on Copyright Law for my class on using multimedia in the classroom. But that was this afternoon. Incidentally, these were the sources I ended up using, just in case anyone else is interested:

http://www.benedict.com
http://teachvu.vu.msu.edu/public/pedagogy
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellec...y/cprtindx.htm

And another source that might be of interest:

http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Sect...tID=25939#newc

The last one describes the "TEACH" act, which is fairly recent, and a bit more specific about how educators can use copyrighted materials.

Please remember that copyright law is different per country - the UK has just updated it's cpoyright laws and made a whole load more shit illegal - be careful which countries you use and which countries law you need to reference.