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Copyright applies to any tangible or electronic
creative work, such as a book, movie, video, song, lyrics, poem, picture,
lesson plan, web page content, etc. Any creative work is copyrighted as soon as
it is created. Intangibles, such as ideas, concepts, and mathematical equations
and works that lack originality cannot be copyrighted. The copyright symbol may
be placed on a work to remind and inform users of its copyright status: ©.
However, the copyright symbol is only a reminder. The absence of the symbol
does not mean that the work is not copyrighted, and the presence of the symbol
is not proof that the work is copyrighted (as will be discussed further in the
case of public domain works). Copyright generally means that others cannot use
copyrighted material without the permission of the author and that permissions
are restrictive. For instance, downloading a bootleg version of a movie is a
violation of copyright, because you did not purchase the copy from the
copyright holder. You can generally provide a web link to copyrighted material
from your own materials without permission from the copyright holder. This is
different from copying/pasting the copyright material into your own work,
because it allows the copyright holder to maintain control of their content and
to generate revenue through web traffic. The primary exception to this rule
would be if you provided a link to materials that should not be publicly
accessible and, therefore, allowed your users to bypass restrictions placed on
the content by the copyright holder. Advancing technologies, ranging from the
player piano to the internet, have always had unintended consequences for
copyright law, and copyright law has always been slow to keep up with advancing
technologies. Copyright law has changed over time, but as new technologies
empower us to share and use copyrighted materials in new ways and at greater
scale, copyright law gradually changes in response.
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Positive Examples
These are examples that would probably
qualify as fair use (i.e. they probably do not violate copyright):
Quoting a few sentences from a book in a
paper on literary criticism;Adding text to a movie screenshot to
critique/parody the movie;Including a paragraph of text from a book in a quiz
as background for asking questions;Showing a short clip from a popular movie to
analyze how it was made.
Negative Examples
These are examples that would probably NOT
qualify as fair use (i.e., they probably violate copyright):
Copying pages from a workbook for students
to complete;Copying or remixing a lesson plan;Creating a calendar of pictures
that were photographed by someone else;Including a popular song as background
music on a YouTube video your students create;Holding a public screening of a movie
in the school auditorium that you have purchased for personal use.
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The terms "open" and
"free" colloquially have many meanings. "Free" generally
has two that may be best understood by referring to their latin
equivalents: gratis and libre. In the context of openly licensed
materials or open educational resources (OER), gratis means that
content and resources are provided at no cost. Libre means that you
are free to do what you want with these resources. The Five "R's" of
Openness, Openness may mean different things to different people, but when we
refer to openness in terms of open licensing, we mean openness that gives us
freedom to do the five R's: Retain, Reuse, Redistribute, Revise, Remix
Open licenses have arisen as a means for openly sharing
content while at the same time preserving desired rights to the author. Open
licenses find a nice balance between the restrictions of copyright and the
unfettered freedoms of public domain, making them a good option for anyone
desiring to share their work with others. Authors of creative works have the
right to release those works under any license they choose (except in cases
where they have signed over that right to a publisher, employer, etc.). Open
educational resources (OER) are made available from many different sources.
This list, though not exhaustive, includes some of the more prominent
providers.
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