Speaker 1: The Internet has completely changed how we access and use information and resources as teachers. You can access, at your fingertips, more helpful media to assist you in your teaching in a single day than teachers used to find in a lifetime. But which of these media can you legally use? Many teachers are at one or the other of two sides of a spectrum. Take Jenny. She is a teacher who couldn't care less about copyright. She copies workbooks, pirates music, burns DVDs, and encourages her students to use popular music in their media projects. Because she believes that everything she does is okay because she is a teacher. Joe, on the other hand, is a teacher who lives in constant fear of copyright. He's afraid to use anything that he finds online and warns his students to never use other people's work, even when it would be educationally valuable to do so. By actually understanding the types of licenses available for creative works, teachers can find a nice balance between Jenny and Joe that allows them to meaningfully use material in their classes without legal or ethical violations. There are three basic types of licenses for creative works. 1. Copyright 2. Public Domain 3. Creative Commons First, let's explore copyright licensing. As a teacher, you need to understand that just about everything you find online is copyrighted. Copyright law in the U.S. applies to any creative work as soon as the work is created, whether or not it is licensed through the U.S. Copyright Office or even if it has the copyright symbol on it. As soon as someone creates a new song, video, lesson plan, book, photograph, presentation, or other resource, that creative work is automatically copyrighted, whether the creator wanted this or not. This means that you should generally assume that everything you find online or offline is copyrighted. Another thing you need to know. Copyright law protects the creator's right to decide how their work will be copied, shared, performed, and displayed. For example, showing a copyrighted movie in a park to hundreds of your BFFs is breaking copyright law even if you are using a legal, original version of the movie. The problem is that you are displaying the movie in a way the creator did not approve. Essentially using your home video copy for a makeshift movie theater. Wait a second, Jenny might argue. Aren't I allowed to use copyrighted material because I'm an educator? Yes, but only under some restrictions. Fair use is an exception to copyright law that allows for anyone to use copyrighted materials without permission if they follow certain requirements. It is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for teachers. It does not mean that teachers can use whatever they want, however they want. Like all laws, fair use is not really black or white, and is mostly a judgment call. But generally, the following are the four factors that should be considered together when deciding if you, or your students, can fairly use a copyrighted resource without permission. First, the purpose for how you will use it. A word that is often used is transformative. Is your use of the creative work transformative, or in other words, different from how it was used before? For example, if you parody a song, you transform it, and that's okay. If you write a book review or a commentary article, you can quote the book as part of your critique. Education is considered a transformative use as well. Second, the nature of the creative work. If it's a creative work, it's harder to argue fair use. Factual information is designed to be cited and reused to some degree. For example, copying pages from an encyclopedia is different from copying pages from Ender's Game. Third, the amount of material that you use. In other words, if you are using a small movie clip to make a point in your presentation, you are probably fine. But if you upload a whole movie to YouTube, even if it's for educational purposes, you're breaking copyright law. Fourth, the impact on the market from your use of the material. This is perhaps the most important factor to consider. Would your use of the material, in the way you plan to use it, hurt the creator's ability to sell and market their work? For example, if something is created specifically for students, like a math workbook, then copying pages from that book might really hurt the market share. In fact, many teachers buy just one workbook with the intention of making copies for all their students. And this is breaking copyright law. Luckily, not all resources online are copyrighted. Some are in the public domain. This means copyright law doesn't apply, and you don't need to worry about meeting fair use restrictions. Jenny and Joe may be worried that public domain works will be too old to be useful in their teaching, but this is often not true. Public domain includes lots of great creative works, such as the works of Shakespeare and Darwin, and they are freely available to anyone. Websites like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, and LibriVox are great examples of places you can go online to find thousands of public domain works that you can freely copy, edit, share, and frankly exploit. In addition to the public domain and traditional copyright, there is a third license that is becoming popular. Imagine you create a great instructional video and put it online. Because you're a teacher, you want your video to teach as many people as possible. So you want other people to use your video, even if they remix it into their own video. But copyright law doesn't allow them to do that without contacting you first. Luckily, Creative Commons is available. Creative Commons allows creators to choose how people use their materials. It makes sharing educational resources much easier. Generally, Creative Commons works, for instance, can be used for anything as long as you cite the author. Sometimes you may need to do other things as well, like keep the work in its original form, or agree to not use the work for commercial gain. Openly licensed educational resources, or OER, are becoming increasingly prevalent on the web and can be found on a variety of sites, and even open textbooks, which are complete textbooks that can be used, copied, and shared for free, and for many subject areas and grade levels. CK-12 and OpenStax are some great examples of open textbook providers that have great content that you can use without seeking permission, as long as you are willing to abide by the open licenses contained in the textbooks. As a teacher, you also create content every day in the form of lesson plans, units, and other educational resources. You, too, can share these copyrighted materials with the world just by releasing them under an open license. Imagine a world where every teacher shared all of their lesson materials on the internet under an open license, and this allowed anyone to use, adapt, and share them. Imagine a world where teachers didn't have to worry about copyright in creating their educational materials for their classes, and where textbooks were freely available to every student, both for viewing online and for printing off in book form. This future isn't far-fetched. It's happening now as more and more educators develop a basic understanding of copyright and creative commons, and how they can freely share their work with others. In such a world, Jenny can be free to legally use the resources that she finds online, and Joe can feel empowered to safely and ethically use materials created by others. With just a basic understanding of copyright and open licensing, you as a teacher can feel empowered and safe in how you use copyrighted material, and you can also set a good example for your students in behaving in a legal and ethical manner. Copyright © 2020, New Thinking Allowed Foundation