Copyright-To Beg, Borrow, or Steal?

According to WordIQ, copyright is a form of intellectual property that grants its holder the sole legal right to copy their works of original expression.  These works can be written, audio, video, and artistic, even architectural work can be copyrighted.  It is my understanding that a person must obtain permission from the creator of the work to use the original product.  Copyright can be confusing to educators and students.  Therefore, teachers need to educate themselves to provide guidelines for their students. 

One exception to this rule is the Fair Use guidelines, which is using the original material for educational purposes without permission from the creator.  For educators, this basically means that you can copy the material for classroom use, not public use nor for any monetary gain.  Copying by teachers must meet the tests of brevity and spontaneity.  The amount of material you use must be brief.  For example, one chapter of a book for the teacher's reference, and the number of copies should be small, such as a class set of an article used one time during one semester.  Many teachers, including myself, are aware of Fair Use.  However, in my opinion we do not always know enough information and at times abuse the Fair Use guidelines.     

While researching, I came across a list of four other categories of copyright:  public domain, traditional copyright, GNU free documentation license, and creative commons.   

Public domain means that the work can be used freely for any purpose.  Usually these are works created before 1923, or works generated by the government.  The owner of a copyrighted work can release that work into public domain.

Traditional copyright is typically what most people know.  This type includes all works created from 1978 to the present that are registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.  It is often represented with the © symbol or the word "Copyright", and is protected for the lifetime of the creator plus another 70 years after death.

GNU Free Documentation License allows you to take a work and redistribute it, and then another person could take it and use it also.  The text in Wikipedia is a good example of this type of license.

Creative Commons includes six different licenses:  attribution, attribution-share alike, attribution-no derivatives, attribution-noncommercial, attribution-noncommercial-share alike, attribution-noncommercial-no derivatives.  Basically these licenses allow you to use and redistribute works if you provide full credit(attribution) to the original owner.

I introduce my students to copyright by using the Power to Learn website.  This site has a For Students section with interactive case studies.  As a class, we discuss the Fair Use-Beg, Borrow, or Steal? lesson.  This is only my second semester teaching this topic, and I plan to develop more activities to add some depth to the original lesson.

While researching this topic, I found some high profile cases involving copyright disputes at the Copyright Website.  It is interesting to read about the popular movies and songs involved in copyright issues.