Here's what I think I learned on Friday about fair use:
The Multimedia
Fair Use Guidelines describe minimum rules for fair use, but were never
intended as specific rules or designed to exhaust the universe of educational
practice. They were meant as a dynamic, rather than static doctrine,
supposed to expand with time, technology, changes in practice. Arbitrary
rules regarding proportion or time periods of use (for instance, 30-second or
45-day rules) have no legal status.
The fact that permission has been sought but not granted is
irrelevant. Permission is not necessary to satisfy fair use.
Fair use is fair use without regard to program or platform. What is fair,
because it is transformative, is fair regardless of place of use. If a student
has repurposed and added value to copyrighted material, she should be able to
use it beyond the classroom (on YouTube, for instance) as well as within
it.
Not every student use of media is fair, but many uses are. One use not
likely to be fair, is the use of a music soundtrack merely as an aesthetic
addition to a student video project. Students need to somehow recreate
to add value. Is the music used simply a nice aesthetic addition or does
the new use give the piece different meaning? Are students adding value,
engaging the music, reflecting, somehow commenting on.the music?
Not everything that is rationalized as educationally beneficial is
necessarily fair use. For instance, photocopying a text book because it is
not affordable is still not fair use.
Tony Richards on 04 Feb 10"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo
