Copyright – how to stay within the law
Everyone has favourite websites they use to find information. You may have found some new ones that looked very useful when you shared your sources with the other course members in Activity 1. When you use these sources to find useful-looking material, apart from making sure that it is of good quality, you also need to take account of the conditions surrounding its use. Simply being on the web does not make something freely available to use in all circumstances. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), of which copyright is just one part (along with Patents, Designs and Trademarks) protect the creators of ideas. Materials that are in some way ‘fixed’ like text, music, pictures, sound recordings and web pages, are protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and may often have an accompanying symbol (©) and/or legal statement.
In most circumstances, works protected by copyright can only be used – and ‘used’ can mean copied, scanned, distributed, stored, adapted, broadcasted or shown - in whole or in part with the permission of the owner. You are personally responsible if you use material without having the necessary permissions and could face prosecution and a hefty fine. You also have a moral duty to act as a good role model to the students in your care in order to help them recognise the importance of keeping legal.
In some cases, obtaining this permission results in a fee being charged and obtaining permission can be time consuming. Our focus within this course is on identifying resources that you can use free of charge and don’t need to seek further permission to use. However, in order to be able to do that you need to know a little more about copyright.
Activity 2 What can I use legally?
The objectives of this course activity are to:
- develop your understanding of ownership of material you find on the web
- develop your knowledge of how to establish what you can and can’t legally do with resources you find on the web.
Look at these examples of material, which are readily available on the web. For each item note down answers to the following questions:
What copyright information can you find out about it?
What can you ‘do’, legally, with this information, in terms of re-using it?
- A video about combustion. [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]
- An article about Uluru, including text and pictures.
Discussion
- You may have had to dig around to find all the information on these works and what you can do with them. The video is taken from the Teachers.tv website, which has a terms of use policy relating to the whole site, setting out the rules. It does, however, recommend that you look at the specific information relating to each individual work. In this instance you can use, share and amend the video, according to the licence information provided.
Most reputable sites have a terms of use or copyright link which provides information on what you can and can’t do with the content you find there.
- The information about the Uluru article and what you can do with it is quite sparse. It looks like it was created by someone called Sunita, a member of the Bloggerbase site. There are some sources listed at the end, which suggests that the creator of the article has used images/text from other sites. The copyright information about this site seems quite restrictive as to what you can and can’t do with the material published there. In this instance, it would be best to go back to the source material, if you can, to see whether you can use it. If you do decide to use material, it is good practice (and usually a legal requirement) to acknowledge the creator of the material you are using.
Like printed materials or works of art, everything published on the web is protected by copyright, even if it looks as if it is ‘free’ information. The rules on copyright, which are already complicated, become more complex in an online world, because it is so easy to copy and transfer electronic information to other people.
The bottom line on copyright is that anything you find on the web, whether text, an image, video clip or piece of audio, ‘belongs’ to someone else, and you should check the copyright statement if there is one, to ascertain what you can legally do with the material.
Activity 3 Unpicking copyright
The objective of this course activity is to explore some of the legal guidance around copyright, and the exceptions to copyright rules.
There are exceptions to the copyright rules which allow you to do a little more with material you find within your teaching than in other contexts.
Read Intellectual Property Office guidance on permitted uses of copyrights works and advice for educational establishments. Note down any exceptions that might legally enable you to use material in your teaching without having to get permission first.
Now imagine you want to use this image of The Great Wall of China in your teaching. Drawing on your notes, come to an agreement in the course forum about the point at which using this material becomes illegal. Could you:
- Show it to your students using the classroom whiteboard?
- Make paper copies of it and distribute it to pupils during a classroom exercise?
- Crop it, so that it fits nicely into the school newsletter or website?
Introducing ourselves