During (and after) the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, educational communities have employed distance education to reach their students. However, not all districts are aware of the legal requirements of using instructional materials in a virtual setting. In recognition of the growth of virtual learning environments, Congress passed the…

Background: The evolution in digital technologies has had an enormous impact on traditional copyright notions. Works in digital form have uniform characteristics and these works can be copied, distributed and stored with ease. Objectives: The focus of this article was how to attain a balance between the need to promote access to works and…

Recent efforts to change the teaching profession and teacher preparation include a number of innovations to use portfolio assessment, value added measures (VAM), accountability metrics and other corporate education reform ideas. These approaches may provoke considerable potential legal consequences. Traditional constitutional and civil rights…

Copyright concerns continue to bedevil K-12 librarians, who are often called upon to act as the copyright officers in public schools. This article describes recent copyright developments of concern to these librarians in three areas: a recent court case involving a university library, pending legislation supported by ALA, and a regulatory update.…

Richard Prince a well-known appropriation artist, made headlines by pressing ever deeper into the gray areas of art, technology, and the law. Specifically, Prince took screenshots of personal photographs that were publicly displayed on Instagram accounts, included his own comments, enlarged and printed them on large canvases, and displayed them at…

The Fair Use exemption to copyright infringement is a difficult concept for those within the legal community because of its unique "case-by-case" application. Without any red line rules, providing guidance to typical users is even more challenging. This paper reviews several recent cases regarding the application of Fair Use and how the…

In November 2012, the educational provisions of the Copyright Modernization Act were proclaimed in force, thereby introducing a number of significant changes to the Canadian Copyright Act. These changes include the expansion of fair dealing to include the purpose of education, the addition of new educational exceptions for the online transmission…

Last month brought an explosion of breaking news about intellectual-property issues, including copyright--the public battle over Internet-piracy bills in Congress, with ideological alliances crisscrossing standard lines, and sponsors turning against their own bills; the Supreme Court decision, "Golan v. Holder," which strengthened copyright…

The upcoming round of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 anticircumvention provision and the questions raised by the copyright infringement lawsuit filed against the against University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for its streaming video practices illustrate the problematic state of the law concerning the digitization…

This book contains valid, real-world copyright questions posed by real-life educators--all answered by a knowledgeable and experienced school attorney. Poor economic conditions have driven publishers to be more aggressive with pursuing improper use of their copyrighted materials. At the same time, new technologies are complicating old copyright…

The first sale doctrine says that after a copyright holder first sells a copy of his or her work, the new owner may do whatever he or she pleases with that copy (assuming that use is legal). This concept came up through common law and was eventually codified in the Copyright Act of 1976. In 2010, two cases were working their way through the U.S.…

University administrators who have distance learning programs under their charge are on the horns of a dilemma. Given the growing litigiousness of copyright holders and the unsettled state of the law, it has become very difficult to establish failsafe administrative rules to guide faculty and student use of copyrighted materials. But the use of…

Copyright in the world of digital information is changing at a fevered pace, even as educators and librarians digitize, upload, download, draw on databases, and incorporate materials into Web-based instruction. It's essential to stay abreast of the basics of copyright law and fair use. Kenneth D. Crews has completely revised his classic text to…

This is the third of three studies of copyright and sound recordings commissioned by the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) in support of the congressionally mandated study of the state of audio preservation in the United States. All three studies have focused on how laws pertaining to sound recordings made before 1972 affect…

Much of higher education's unease arises from the cost of dealing with illegal file sharing. Illinois State University, for example, calculated a cost of $76 to process a first claim of copyright infringement and $146 for a second. Responses range from simply passing along claims to elaborate programs architected with specific goals in mind.…