How do news/media literacy dependent upon copyright/fair use?

HOW EDUCATORS TEACHING ABOUT THE NEWS DEPEND ON COPYRIGHT & FAIR USE

By Renee Hobbs

We started out talking about how teacher’s lack of knowledge and fear creates confusion. Teachers get misinformation from large copyright holders, who create curriculum materials with a point of view that favors the copyright OWNERS. News about music downloading / filesharing news has also created a lot of media buzz, inciting fear. Teachers want to be good models for responsible use of copyrighted materials. They want to teach students how to respect the law. This project was developed by Renee Hobbs, Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

In extensive interviews with media literacy educators in K-12, university and youth media organizations, we found that teachers cope with copyright confusion by three means:

See no evil— just avoiding any new information on the subject of copyright and fair use
Close the door – do whatever they want inside their classrooms, but not share information or resources with colleagues
Hyper compliance — adhere to a rigid set of “rules,” often making students adhere to rules more rigid than they themselves apply to their own work

Many teachers are familiar with the “educational use guidelines” like the 10 / 45 rule…can use it for 10 days review for 45 days then have to erase
Others include: 30 sec of song or 10 %, 16 lines of a poem, all rules we have heard before. These guidelines have been well-meaning but they have actually interfered with the law itself. They have narrowed the rights that the Doctrine of Fair Use provides to citizens under the law.

The code of best practices recognizes that we need to be able to take advantage of the fact that owners are users. People share and build upon each others’ creative ideas.

Quiz: What’s the purpose of copyright? Most teachers say, “it protects owners’ property rights.” But the U.S. Constitution says that the purpose of copyright is to promote creativity and innovation in the creation of knowledge. Wow!

We looked at a rough cut of an elementary school creating PSA
http://themediaspot.org/videos/328

What the code of best practices will say when it’s released on November 11.

Teachers can:

make copies of newspaper articles, tv shows, and other copyrighted works to use them and keep them for educational use
create curriculum materials and scholarship with copyrighted materials embedded
share sell and distribute curriculum materials with copyrighted materils embedded

Learners can:

use copyrighted works in creating new material
distribute their works digitally if they meet the transformativeness standard

Transformative use is defined as adding value or repurposing, even for commercial purposes. We watched an animatic for a music video explaining the concept of transformativeness.

Look for the curriculum materials at the Media Education Lab which will be available after November 11.