Fair Use and Copyright Lesson

Does anyone know of any resources for teaching about fair use and copyright for high school student? I would like to teach about what you can and can't use but am having a hard time finding a good lesson to start with. I guess there is just too much ground to cover and I don't know where to start.

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Permalink Reply by Helen Otway on March 8, 2008 at 5:05am

Great resource Kathy. Very relevant for my schools at the moment.

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Permalink Reply by Helen Otway on March 8, 2008 at 5:04am

Check out the video on Copyright created with Disney characters on my home page.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on March 9, 2008 at 12:47pm

I watched the video and loved it. I kept thinking who watched all those movies closely enough to pick out each word. So can you use a snippet of Disney? haha.

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Permalink Reply by cathy davidson on March 8, 2008 at 7:21am

My favorite resource is the Bound by Law comic book produced by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. It is designed for documentary film makers but introduces many issues with both an activist/Creative Commons intent but very clever illustrations (the excellent illustrator Keith Aoki) that show context and use. I recommend it highly. You can also download it free for CSPD (which is in the law school at Duke) or you can purchase it from the site.

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Permalink Reply by Colin Davitt on March 8, 2008 at 11:45am

Thanks to all who have posted. I have a few ideas on how I might go about teaching this.

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Permalink Reply by samccoy on March 8, 2008 at 10:39pm

Creative Commons is the place to go for copyright and fair use information, including some very successful educational programs. I think high school students would benefit from the stories, philosophy and lessons from Lawrence Lessig's classic book, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity.

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Permalink Reply by Ann on March 9, 2008 at 12:42pm

You can take a look at the links I saved for my seventh and eighth graders: http://del.icio.us/saintmichael/7th-grade and http://del.icio.us/saintmichael/8th-grade. The links are in the oldest posts back at the beginning of the school year. It might give you some ideas.

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Permalink Reply by Teresa on April 15, 2009 at 4:24pm

Thank you to all for this discussion! For my 7th and 8th graders, I used 2 recent examples (the Obama poster that AP claimed was an infringed copyright) and the story about YouTube taking out audio or removing videos completely. My kids really related to this one, three of them have received the email from YouTube to change their audio or remove the file.
I used the first half of the Disney video as a pairs cloze activity, that gave them background info. Then each pair received one part of copyright law or one of the date ranges what is legal when using the Digital Video Slider. If they received a part of the law (ex., "A copyrighted work must be original") they had to look up the key word--in this case, original--and explain it to us in terms of what it means for copyright. If they had the Digital Copyright Slider they were given a date range and had to explain what was or was not protected by copyright. They shared what they learned by creating a poster (this was quick, they had 20 min to create!), then presented to the class. The students had some great questions, I'll continue next week with a discussion/activity on Creative Commons and Fair Use. Thanks again for all the great resources, saved me tons of time.

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Permalink Reply by Ann on April 15, 2009 at 5:31pm

It sounds like a great lesson. I recently found this Code of Best Practices for Fair Use site. It's another good resource.

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Permalink Reply by Kev on April 15, 2009 at 6:46pm

That disney video is perhaps the greatest thing I've ever seen.

I want to make one based on FOX and using music sampled from Warner Bros. They are they two companies who are constantly censoring my stuff on youtube.

Interestingly, Disney seems fine with what I do with their material.

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Permalink Reply by Chris GR on April 15, 2009 at 9:59pm

I created a blog for my students to access about Fair Use and the case of Shepard Fairey using a picture of Pres. Obama to make a poster.

It is at: http://nbccomputer.ning.com/profiles/blogs/fair-use-or-fairey-use

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Permalink Reply by Anna van Someren on April 23, 2009 at 12:10pm

Here at New Media Literacies, we've just finished creating 3 interactive, multimedia challenges on these issues. They are called "Mannie Gracia and Copyright", "Shepard Fairey and Fair Use", and "Optimus Prime and Creative Commons", and you can find them here: http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/ll/NMLLL.html#

-Anna van Someren, NML