Speaker 1: Activate everything that you already know about copyright. My name is Novella Bailey, and I'm a middle school teacher at Westside Collaborative Middle School in New York City. This lesson's about fair use. If you have your own created work, right, there are some instances where people can take pieces of it, and it's allowed even if it's copyrighted. Our students really, really need to work on using evidence to support their thinking, and that's one of the big standards for reading and just across the board with the Common Core Standards. So, the first thing that we do is we prepare the students with giving them some exposure to the key vocabulary related to this topic. What I want you to do is look at the center of the diamond, these things, like schoolwork and education, or news reporting, criticizing or commenting. Think about where or some examples of where someone could use fair use. Then we go deep into understanding fair use and understanding when it can be used and under what lenses. Raise your hand if you have something that you noticed as you read about fair use that helps you understand what it means or when it can be applied. Great.

Speaker 2: Naomi? I noticed that you can only use it if it's a small amount for schoolwork and education, news reporting.

Speaker 3: Like, you redo it, you kind of remake it, you make it happen again even though it was made already.

Speaker 1: Once the kids have these basic understandings of fair use and when it can be applied and how it can be applied, then they really get to be the decision makers. I'm going to be asking the students to evaluate two different pieces of work that have copyrighted material in it. And they're being asked to take notes on what they notice and then use those notes as evidence once they decide if something is fair use or not. They're going to be broken up into groups of about five or six because I think discussion allows students to really think about what key pieces are relevant or what details are relevant when they're making a key decision. The first one we're going to look at is called Scary Mary. And this piece is a video remix of a fake movie trailer. But he used information and footage from an old movie. So we're going to look at it and look at the entire thing really closely. All right, so let's get it going. So we can't show you these clips because there are issues with it being fair use, even though this is an educational video. But you can use it as an exercise in your classroom. All right, so what I would like you to do is discuss with your group what you noticed that was happening. Make a decision and then write down your evidence. Go, discuss in your groups. Some parts of clips from like another movie that one of them were in, like a movie. Does that count as making it new or is it still too much content? It's still too much content. You guys discuss, discuss. You guys, what did you guys agree, yes or no? Yes. All right. Get yourselves ready. Share, share.

Speaker 4: Jasperie? Well, we picked yes because they did make it into a parody, but we got stuck a little bit because at first we thought they used too much of the movie and just like twitched it up a little bit. Go ahead, Jackson. And if it, it would actually be illegal to put it on the internet if it was, if it wasn't, you know, copyrighted.

Speaker 3: The end of the video, it said it was edited and it says Mary Poppins in quotes at the

Speaker 1: top. Wonderful. What I'm really noticing that I want you to continue for the next one is the use of evidence to support your thinking. This is what is called a mashup, I believe, and how many people have heard of DJ Earworm already? Oh my goodness. So he has fans here already. Great. Let's take a look. All righty. This is what we need to do. You have to either decide, maybe you are, you know, Beyonce's lawyer or maybe you're DJ Earworm's lawyer. Is it fair use? Isn't it fair use?

Speaker 3: One thing that we did learn is that if it's, you can't use long, long clips from a video. Think about it. If he would have gotten in trouble for doing that, then all the DJs would get in trouble. He didn't show that it was edited or anything, but the only good part, like the 70% like

Speaker 1: Cece said, is that it only contains short clips from the music video. So what did you guys come up with and what's your evidence to support your opinion?

Speaker 5: He didn't really use it in his own words. He just copied it from other music videos. But he only, but the good thing was he only used parts of the song.

Speaker 3: I do agree with Alex that it was fair use because even though he didn't really have anything original in there, it was still used as fair use. He wasn't trying to make money off of it. I actually had no idea that I was against the law. Different rappers, I used to like not take their lyrics, I used to take the beat that they used and then try to improvise and put in my own lyrics in it.

Speaker 4: I really did not know it was illegal because there's so many things on like YouTube when they're making parodies. So I thought it was like, oh, they're just making fun of it. But now with the lesson I learned that there's actually restrictions of how much you can use or if you can use it at all without getting sued or anything.

Speaker 1: I like the way you were using your new vocabulary terms. I saw people saying like small clips, edited, permissions, remix, mashup. All those things are words that relate to this kind of stuff. They were just so into it. And it really opened up for me as a teacher how connected my students are to digital media and how powerful it can be to get them inspired, to get them thinking, to get them to begin to collect evidence. It's just a great tool. And I feel like I tapped into an element of their lives that you don't necessarily tap into in the classroom every day.