Learn how to use copyright and stay legal in the K-12 classroom.
K-12 WHAT IS LEGAL IN THE SCHOOL CLASSROOM?
FAIR USE K-12 EDUCATION, DISTANCE LEARNING HIGHER ED
U. S. Copyright Law, Title 17 - Section 107 is the section of copyright law that addresses fair use.
These are the four criteria, which are very vague, that you will need to meet:
1) The purpose and character of the 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;
4) The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
What are your Fair Use Rights?
The fair use statute states: use for criticism, comment, news reporting,
[education]teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research is not an copyright infringement. There is another entire area of fair use for criticism, comment, and reporting. This is a use of a copyrighted work that is different than educational use. You can reproduce a portion of something for the purpose of analyzing and criticizing this portion, this is also within fair use. It may be fair use for a student to simply incorporate a copyrighted work into a school project for creative or illustrative purpose, when the audience remains the classroom, but it would not be fair use to post that project on a public school site. The public posting would remove the 'educational purpose' protection. However, if a student incorporates a portion of a copyrighted work into a project for the purpose of criticism, then it would meet the standards of fair use to post this either internally or externally. The privilege of fair use does not end when a student leaves the schoolhouse gate. The educational privilege would end at this limit. But the criticism
privilege would continue. ~ Nancy Willard
What is Fair Use really?
The fair-use doctrine, allows reproduction of copyrighted works for noncommercial purposes like "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research." But there is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provision, which holds that a Web site is not liable for any infringing material posted on it, as long as the site's operators remove that material when asked to do so by a copyright holder. ( this came from the Viacon vs. Google Youtube suit)
New Program Urges Students to Resist the RIAA
The Digital Freedom Campaign believes that the best way to reach college students about the appropriate uses of technology is to engage them, not to prosecute them," a spokesman for the group said in a written statement. "While illegal music downloads continue to be a serious challenge on college campuses, students are the catalysts of the digital age and are far more likely to respect the rights of artists if their digital freedoms are respected as well."
“You’re not buying music, you’re buying a key,” says Larry Kenswil, the president of the eLabs division of the Universal Music Group
EMI Music Launches DRM-Free Superior Sound Quality Downloads Across Its Entire Digital Repertoire 4/1/07
Boucher and Doolittle Introduce the FAIR USE Act of 2007
THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
Article 1.
Section. 8.
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html
"There's nothing in the Constitution that "protects" the rights granted under the exclusive rights clause in the sense people usually think of rights protected by a Constitution. "Constitutionally protected Rights" encapsulates this deception. Remember it actually says "The Congress shall have Power . . . " -- which demonstrates that the Rights in question are statutory, not the fundamental rights one might think is being presented, which was settled in the first major Supreme Court copyright case, Wheaton v. Peters. The fact that it's up to Congress to devise what exclusive rights policy will best promote the progress of science and the useful arts, is a bubble many "DRM" proponents would like to burst. The term "DRM" is the same sort of deception."
"The rights that copyright holders get are *statutory* rights, not constitutional ones; the Constitution merely empowers Congress to define what rights are appropriate, and it's done so in a way that creates a set of rights smaller than the set of powers that current technologies seek to claim for the sellers.
One of the problems with D-"R"-M is that the "rights" it seeks to "protect" usually go well beyond what Congress has legislated -- to a point where they are not rights at all, but just grabby.
Two examples will make this clear. (1) The Supreme Court has said that we have a right to "time shift" a broadcast -- record it now, play it later. Some DRM systems try to make this impossible. Calling that "rights" protection is misleading, since what's being stopped isn't part of the right. (2) The copyright statute gives us all a right of fair use. D-"R"-M that makes any copying impossible isn't illegal -- but it's "protecting" the content in a way that materially exceeds the scope of the right granted by copyright law.
If the average person "knows" something different -- for example "knows" that Copyright comes straight from the Constitution without the mediating institution of Congress whether acting alone or implementing treaties -- then, once again, the average person "knows" something that ain't so.
"The technical term Digital Rights Management is about "digital rights" -- as in access rights to digital information. Whether those digital access rights correspond or not to legal rights is an open, local and variably-understood question. It may well be that DRM imposes access restrictions that are not legal in some jurisdictions, while they are legal in others. OTOH, technically, "protection" is not the same as "rights".
Fair Use Economy Represents One-Sixth of U.S. GDP
Sep 12, 2007
WASHINGTON D.C. - Fair Use exceptions to U.S. copyright laws are responsible for more than $4.5 trillion in annual revenue for the United States, according to the findings of an unprecedented economic study released today. According to the study commissioned by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and conducted in accordance with a World Intellectual Property Organization methodology, companies benefiting from limitations on copyright-holders’ exclusive rights, such as “fair use” – generate substantial revenue, employ millions of workers, and, in 2006, represented one-sixth of total U.S. GDP.The exhaustive report, released today at a briefing on Capitol Hill, quantifies for the first time ever the critical contributions of fair use to the U.S. economy. The timing proves particularly important as the debates over copyright law in the digital age move increasingly to center stage on Capitol Hill. As the report summarizes, in the past twenty years as digital technology has increased, so too has the importance of fair use. With more than $4.5 trillion in revenue generated by fair use dependent industries in 2006, a 31% increase since 2002, fair use industries are directly responsible for more than 18% of U.S. economic growth and nearly 11 million American jobs. In fact, nearly one out of every eight American jobs is in an industry that benefits from current limitations on copyright.
“As the United States economy becomes increasingly knowledge-based, the concept of fair use can no longer be discussed and legislated in the abstract. It is the very foundation of the digital age and a cornerstone of our economy,” said Ed Black, President and CEO of CCIA. “Much of the unprecedented economic growth of the past ten years can actually be credited to the doctrine of fair use, as the Internet itself depends on the ability to use content in a limited and nonlicensed manner. To stay on the edge of innovation and productivity, we must keep fair use as one of the cornerstones for creativity, innovation and, as today’s study indicates, an engine for growth for our country”
IP INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TOP
- FAIR USE VS. DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT
- GOOGLE DIGITIZING IN-COPYRIGHT BOOKS
-
IP MUSIC LAW
- CopyOwn: Copyright Ownership Guide for the Higher Education Community
- Intellectual Property Conference
- Internet Intellectual Property Mall
- Researching Intellectual Property Law in an International Context
- European Patent Office
- Yale University Engineering and Applied Science Library
- WEB LAW FAQ 1996-99
- PATENT LAW worldwide patent office sites, legal search engines, legal templates, and patent law firms.
- TRIPS, "trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights,"
- Union of BC Indian Chiefs' Email Distribution List
Protecting Knowledge: Traditional Resource Rights in the New Millennium.The purpose of this list is provide information relating to Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights / Traditional Resource Rights in the areas of culture and heritage.
N.C. Professor is allowed to sell his class lectures online The 60/40 split a NC professor of communication, had been selling lectures from his classes to students and others through a Web site called Independent Music Online. The lectures, in MP3 format, sold for $2.50 each, with $1.00 going to Mr. Schrag and $1.50 going to the music Web site. Professors at NC own their IP content. Engineering and science professors often receive compensation for the intellectual material they produce, so why shouldn't humanities and social sciences professors be paid as well? his lectures are meant for three audiences: students who are motivated
to do well in the course and want access to supplemental material,
international students who may have difficulty understanding English,
and students who would prefer to skip class.
3/06 "A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a writer who claimed [Google] infringed on his copyright by archiving a Usenet posting of his and providing excerpts from his Web site in search results."
The key ruling: "When an ISP automatically and temporarily stores data without human intervention so that the system can operate and transmit data to its users, the necessary element of volition (willful intent to infringe) is missing," the court said.
Intellectual Property and the New Class Divisions The Chronicle 5.1.28
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i21/21a01402.htm
The concept of intellectual property has created a class division between "hackers" -- producers of information, be they academics, creative artists, or others -- and a suffocating "new ruling class" that has seized ownership of this property via patents, copyrights, and trademarks. So argues McKenzie Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at New School University, in A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press).
Q. What's new about what this so-called ruling class is doing?
A. Until the late 60s, one thought of copyright or patent as a kind of limited device, in the context of thinking of knowledge as something that should be shared. Intellectual property turns it into the
equivalent of a private-property right. That's equivalent to the enclosure of the commons, in my view.
Q. But why should information differ from any other good?
A. Information has really peculiar qualities. My possession of some piece of it does not deprive you of it. So the usual laws of scarcity don't apply. With the rise of digital technology, for the first time
we have something that can, at least in part, really escape from scarcity.
Economic logic usually starts by saying desires are infinite but means are scarce, therefore we need resource allocation. Here we have a nonrivalrous good. We have something that challenges the whole notion of scarcity. That presents a utopian possibility that one should
explore to the limit. But what one finds is that we are increasingly shoving information back into the logic of the old economy of scarce things by legal and technical means.
Q. And the new intellectual-property regime prevents "hackers" from building on or toying with products that in essence are cultural artifacts?
A. Exactly. We have the beginnings of whole new kinds of what I would call abstract-gift economy. That would include the free-software movement, for example, and the rise of listservs, and the file-sharing ... movement, which is really a social movement in all but name that is creating pressure for change ... embodied in a movement around sharing information as a gift.
Q. How can we construe intellectual property more expansively?
A. If you're a programmer, or a musician, or a philosopher, or a biologist, or a chemist -- those tend to be fairly separate cultural worlds. But all that we make is now rendered equivalent in the marketplace by the privatizing of information, by intellectual property.
So the first thing is to see a common interest that isn't really addressed by completely privatizing information. It's not in the interest of the United States or any country to make information available only to those who can pay for it. That's not how you advance science. That's not how you advance democracy.
PATENT ISSUES
patent - 1376, shortened form of lettre patent, lit. "open letter," from O.Fr. patente (adj.), also in M.L. (litteræ) patentes, both O.Fr. and M.L. from L. patentum (nom. patens) "open, lying open," prp. of patere "lie open, be open." Sense of "open to view, plain, clear" is first recorded 1508; the verb "to obtain right to land" is 1675; meaning "copyright an invention" is 1822, from meaning "exclusive right, monopoly."
1) Patents were invented to give entrepreneurs incentive to go out there and think it up. Then a patent would protect their ideas from being stolen. This is ok. Now it has gotten out of control. Corporations spend zillions of dollars on lawyers to get congress passing laws that protect their "property".
2) When you patent software (think microsoft) it means that it takes away the right of anybody else in our world, our culture, our society to improve it. Their license says they own it. If you tried to improve it for your own use, on your own machine, for your own business, they can come and arrest you!
3) You are stuck with the product you bought from microsoft, bugs and all. This works against the consumer. This is why open source code has become a major alternative. Now a person can improve the program to meet their own needs, kill bugs, make the program do stuff it didn't do before, stuff you need it to do - without fear of going to jail.
Search for the applied patents granted patents, and patent applications. Patent Office Puts Applications Online published patent applications under the American Inventors Protection Act. New applications will be published every Thursday.
Patent and Trademark Depository Library
OK - if you can't patent it then g'head copyright it instead.
Intellectual Improprieties A leading gadfly picks some of the worst patents of all time - stupid patents issued by the USPTO
Cornell sues H-P for patent infringement Damages may exceed $100M
