Shannon's+Response


 * Your boss/principal asks you to create a distance education/learning course in either a business or education setting. When you begin to outline your course, you realize there will be copyright issues you will encounter. What sort of issues might you face? How will you deal with them? Will any problems need you to request a copyright? If so, what?; if not, why?**

Before I even start outlining my course, I need to know where I stand with the institution. If I am in educational institution, I can have more flexible with copyright rights than if I am in a business setting. According to Simonson et al, Fair Use – is “the fair use of copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom uses), scholarship, or research, is not an infrignment”. However as educators in educational institutions are not granted the permissions unless they have met four criteria that was set up by the Congress.

In educational institution, I would look at materials carefully and see whether they fall in four criteria that the Congress set and if they are, I will be able to share those works with my students and discuss about the materials.

If I am in a business setting, I would be able to use works if they are public domain, creative commons or I would have to seek for permissions to use the copyrighted works that may be at a cost. Many companies are reluctant about giving permissions because it may give others to download or print materials without paying.

In a business setting, I have to be extremely careful about using copyrighted materials because if we were caught using copyrighted materials without permissions, we may lose our business. It is best to buy royalty for materials, songs, and/or video and we can prove that we have rights to use them because we paid for them. We also can use materials that are considered as public domain and creative commons.

If there is a material that I MUST have, I would have to write a letter and send it to the publisher asking for the permission as well as stating the reasons why I wanted to use their works and basically hope that they would give me an okay. Not many companies are willing to do that. The only thing that they are willing to do if we make it to be more accessible for those with disabilities because they would not have to pay extra to have it to provide audio description for the blind or captions for the deaf but rather the company who requested for it and provided the services.

For example, even in educational institution, you can’t convert any kind of copyrighted materials into another format, if it was printed, you can’t convert it into digital without asking permissions even though you fall in Fair Use. Any kind of modifications to the copyrighted materials must be requested before you can do the modifications. It goes the same with converting a copyrighted VHS to DVD or adding features to copyrighted VHS or DVD.

So it does not matter whether if you are in an educational or business setting, you have to be extremely careful with copyrighted materials and check before you do any kind of changes, modifications, or distribution. You do not want to end up paying fines for something that you thought you had the permissions to do so.

Reference:

Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M.; Zvacek, S., (2009). //Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Foundations of Distance Education//. Boston: Pearson.