As a teacher implements their own material into the modern 21st century classroom, they must use extreme caution when “borrowing” any material to enhance their class. Teachers have an ethical and moral responsibility to their students to demonstrate the proper use of material as it relates to Copyright Law, Fair Use Guidelines, Public Domain, and Creative Commons.
This means taking a blockbuster movie clip and playing it in the classroom without the authorization of the owner of this movie, violates copyright law. However, under the Fair Use Guidelines, you may be able to play this video clip if it is less than three minutes or less than 10%, whichever is less (Starr, 2010). What about if the movie is Public Domain? Public Domain may apply to copyright material. This means once that teachers must research if the material they wish to use is part of public domain. As a rule, if its copyright has expired, or is a government resource, it is considered public domain. Finally, as more teachers integrate technology into their classrooms, they may place their own created works in Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows the sharing of this material without fear of copyright infringement since they are placed into an area which can be shared by anyone.
As you can see, simply being aware of some general rules as it relates to using multimedia in the classroom, can pay big dividends in the future when implementing these tools in the classroom.
References
Starr, L. (May 25, 2010). Copyright law and new technologies. Part 3 of a series on copyright and fairuse. Education World.
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