Copyright, Fairuse, and Permissible Amounts

The University of Maryland has published a website that explains Copyright, Fairuse, and Permissible Amounts for educators. As defined by UMUC, Copyright is a piece of legislation that protects authors of art, literature, and works that explains information or ideas from intellectual robbery. This gives authors the control over how their work is used and consumed by the public.

In order to be copyrighted, the work must be fixed, original, and original in some way. If a work is fixed, this means that the information is written down, posted online, or stored on some sort of electronic device. If a work is original, this means that the author has created this idea from his or her own expression or ideas. Works do not have to be completely original to be eligible for copyright, they can be adapted or combined form other works or ideas. If a work is creative, this means that the work is beyond the original. In order to be eligible, a work needs only to be ever so slightly creative.

There are some things that cannot be copyrighted, though. These are considered public domain. Ideas, facts, names, and short phrases are some examples. Slogans, however, can be protected by the trademark law.  Works created by government officials while they are on duty are not eligible to be copyrighted.

Fairuse, according to UMUC, is a limitation on the copyright holder's exclusive rights. Individuals may use copyrighted materials but need to consider these main points: the purpose of use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount/importance of what's used, effect of potential market of product.

Educators have rules about how many times they can copy a work, how much of the work they can copy, and how much planning it would take to get permission to copy the work.

What counts as Fairuse according to UMUC?

1. novel or book chapters
2. a newspaper article
3. short stories, essays, poems. 
4. chart, graphs, diagrams
5. poetry

Some actions should be avoided when considering Fairuse. These are: using copyrighted materials for commercial use, using the materials repeatedly, using a work in its entirety.

<Copyright
                                   Trademark>

Award Winning Teacher Blog.

Ms. Cassidy's Classroom is a blog intended for sharing content with parents of her first grade students and other educators. She shares posts about daily happenings in her room. She also collects anecdotes of each child's learning on this site. I believe that she has the children create their own blogs, and post certain things to this blog. These anecdotes include drawings, videos, images of the child participating in something. This provides parents with easy access to what their child is doing in the classroom. It also helps the teacher keep up with important anecdotes that may become lost in the classroom. While the posts that are currently featured are from the very first of the year, the work samples are small and the children are spending much time simply learning routines. I see this blog becoming more of a staple of their classroom learning as the children progress through the school year.

Here are some images shared as anecdotes:

 

Here are some  images shared as whole class blog posts: 

I feel that this very beneficial for certain classrooms and grade levels. It certainly works well for this teacher. While her organization is wonderful and her pictures are cute as a button, I would worry about confidentiality with this blog. I know nothing about these children, but their images are posted online for the whole world to see. I would probably use a password protected blog, if anything. I would also not require the students to make and keep up with their own blogs, but my four year olds are on a much different level than these first graders. I like the idea of keeping up with anecdotes digitally, but again would keep them on a password protected blog or mobile application such as Seesaw. My question would be about how to make these "edublogs" private. I know there is a setting on Blogger (or there use to be) to make people put in a password when loading the page, but not sure about "edublog".