Caveats: NONE
Schools are in a unique position under the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act(DMCA). In many ways they function as a Online Service Provider
(OSP) and can not be held accountable for copyright infringements (but
the students and staff who posted still can). Basically as long as
follow these general principles the school will be OK but individual
faculty, staff and students may be exposed.
--have no knowledge of, or financial benefit from, the infringing
activity=20
--provide proper notification of its policies to its subscribers=20
--set up an agent to deal with copyright complaints
The big exception is if a school hosts copyrighted material is posted as
part of "required or recommended" materials for instruction. There is a
lot to copyright and the DMCA and it is worth having a staff member
become well versed in the nuances.
Steps you can take are:
1. Have a copyright statement in the faculty/staff handbook. I can't
seem to find my reference sample, but it basically says the school
respects the rights of copyright holders and tells them who to go to
with questions and who to go to if they receive a complaint. The policy
should be broad enough to cover any technology (blog, moodle, paper).
This protects the school.
2. Have a copyright notice on your web site. This should define the
copyright of your materials (who owns what gets posted on moodle, who to
contact for permission to publish, etc.) and the designated agent for
dealing with copyright complaints. Creative Commons
(www.creativecommons.org) has a number of pre-made licenses to choose
from that cover most situations. Just make sure you specify a license
(e.g. non-commercial, share-a-like) and don't just say "Creative
Commons". For the agent piece, I would recommend a generic email like
DMCA@school.edu. Even schools should be operating an abuse@school.org
email to deal with spam complaints and that can be used as well. This
protects the school and the authors of content for your site.
3. I liked to provide staff with the following information:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter6/ind
ex.html
But you need to have some set of guidelines that flesh out the details
of your copyright policy (I made separate ones for blogging, web
posting, etc.). Not everyone gets the full range of implications for
"respecting copyright" as defined in a policy and these guidelines
provide details without causing the policy to grow to unmanageable
proportions. =20
Most of the time, I encouraged staff to link to resources, rather than
copying them to the site when ever possible. Fair use provides a lot of
flexibility, but it is a gray area that can be avoided in a lot of cases
by simply linking. This primarily protects your faculty and staff.
4. Remind faculty and staff that that proper citation is good, but it
is not a defense. Citation and a list of works cited is a defense
against plagiarism, which is not a crime. You can plagiarize without
violating copyright and you can violate copyright without plagiarizing.
Plagiarizing may cause you to lose a job, but copyright violations have
legal consequences.
5. Requiring authentication to get into portions of your site will
limit the ability for you to be caught violating copyright laws by
automated tools that comb the web on behalf of rights holders. This
does not absolve the school or the person who posted the material, but
makes it significantly less likely that you will receive many notices of
violations (especially false positives that come from tools that
automatically generate DMCA takedown notices).
I think by now, everyone knows I am not a lawyer. ;-)
_Jason
___________________________________
Jason Johnson - Program Director
Web Services Branch - Walter Reed Army Medical Center Ingenium (ISO
9001:2000 certified)
Office: 202-782-1047
Cell: 202-262-0516
jason.johnson@ingenium.net
jason.p.johnson2@us.army.mil=20
-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators
[mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of Phizacklea, Jeanne
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 8:56 AM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Copyright and Moodle
For those of you who are using Moodle, do you have guidelines about
posting copyrighted materials? Are they the same as you have for other
web content? What about music? Will a simple works cited list suffice?
Several questions about copyright just arose in a training session with
teachers, and if you have policies or information to share, I'd greatly
appreciate it.
=20
Thanks so much.
=20
Jeanne
=20
=20
************************************************
Jeanne Phizacklea
Director of Library & Information Services
Friends School of Baltimore
=20
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ] Submissions to
ISED-L are released under a Creative Commons license.
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED=20
Caveats: NONE
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a Creative Commons license.
