Copyright & Fair Use in Education
Most of us have used the internet to create slideshows, presentations, videos, and essays. It's so easy to actually grab something from the internet (good old copy and paste) and put it into our work without crediting the owner. As teachers and students, it's ethically and legally important to understand copyright and fair use.
What is "Fair Use"?
Fair Use has been long debated. There are no rules. In a general sense, a fair use is a copying a copyrighted work and using it for a "transformative" purpose such as to comment upon, criticize, or to make a parody of.
Well, what is "Copyright"?
Copyright protects works such as poetry, movies, video, video games, plays, movies, art, streaming audio and video, recorded music performances and basically anything in a tangible medium of expression. It must be original, straightforward, and created by it's author to qualify. As I said earlier, it's pretty a debatable topic, yet very sensitive.
Copyright as a Musician
As a musician, copyright is an important part of my work. I post music onto Spotify, iTunes, Deezer, Apple Music, Google Play, and much more, I pay for the cover licensing and a percentage of my work goes to the distribution company and the composer. I am paying to use and play the musical form, however I am not paying for the audio itself. It's actually illegal to use the audio; the audio in which the recording artists and producers worked very hard to create. Thus, I record and produce my own.
I also post videos on YouTube to promote my music. I shoot and edit my own videos and audio, so I make sure that all my music is copyrighted. I also make sure that my videos are original and not stolen footage of other people's work.
YouTube videos are copyrighted to the person who created and uploaded the video. It does not extend to those who upload TV material or someone else's work.
Copyright is super complicated and I recommend checking Stanford's overview of Copyrights.
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