TopLegal Background
A central aspect of education is intellectual pursuit and the recognition of great minds. Yet teachers bemoan the rise in cheating, which technology facilitates. On their part, students have a more lax attitude about intellectual property. Particularly with media and crowdsourcing, which foster collaborate knowledge generation, identifying the originator of an idea can be difficult to ascertain. Furthermore, the informational content itself may be dynamic so that the authorship and copyright may change over time.
Although intellectual property is sometimes used interchangeably with copyright, the former is a broader concept. Copyright protects creative and original ideas that are recorded in tangible form. Other U. S. intellectual property laws deal with trademarks, patents, trade secretes, and licenses.
Copyright laws seek solutions to give authors fair compensation for sharing their work. Begun as a way to give scientists and inventors lead time to prevent others from using their work without permission, copyright laws in the United States have become more far-ranging, both in terms of expanded formats as well as issues of authorship and access. According to current law, the copyright owner has the exclusive right, and can authorize others, to reproduce, distribute, display, publicly perform, and make derivative works based on the original work. The duration of the copyright term has lengthened over the years, starting from a length of 28 years (as established in 1790) to 70 years after the death of the author, according to the 1998 Act.
Publishing has also impacted copyright over time. Reporters increasingly get personal credit and remuneration for their contributions, which historically were considered solely work for hire. Publishers create copyright agreements to cover authorship rights based on format. Multimedia copyright laws can be very specific: restricting resizing or other image manipulation, stipulating the length of music or video that can be copied legitimately. Fortunately, education falls under the umbrella of Fair Use, so restrictions are loosened up a bit in order to support personal research.
The chief statute driving copyright law is the Copyright Act of 1976, which became effective in 1978. Several factors were included for the first time in this piece of legislation: a codification of fair use, the right for an author to receive copyright for an unpublished work, and the divisibility of authors’ rights. The Act includes definitions, delineates what is copyrightable, and describes copyright rights and limitations.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was added to the Act in 1998, largely to conform to international treaties (note that no international copyright law exists) that dealt with technological issues, particularly online material. DMCA limits database company liability, and addresses digital preservation.
Educators and leaders also need to know about the 2002 Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act, which impacts copyright usage in distance education or in cases where digital information is transmitted as a supplement face-to-face instruction. Displays and performances can be disseminated only for the period of the course and only to those students who are enrolled in the course. Likewise, if teachers copy an article for a face-to-face class, then they can link to the same article online, depending on the magazine database license agreement. A better solution is for the teacher to provide the citation, and ask the students to access the article themselves from the library’s database collection. However, the teacher should not download the whole magazine issue just because it is technically possible; that action probably does not comply with copyright law.