Copyright Issues in Teaching with Technology

A Brief Overview of Copyright
Copyright is one of four major categories of intellectual property protection, along with patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. Copyrights in fact are sometimes confused with patents. Copyrights cover works of authorship representing the tangible expression of ideas, requiring originality and some degree of creativity. Patents are issued for inventions that demonstrate novel, non-obvious, and useful products or methods. While works of authorship may be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, protection begins immediately after a work is fixed in a tangible form. Patent protection begins only after approval by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. A further discussion of patents is beyond the scope of this paper.

The first forms of copyright protection in Europe followed not long after invention of the printing press. Congress enacted the first U.S. copyright legislation in 1790, a bill modeled after the Statute of Anne, passed by Parliament in 1714. The law (Title 17 of the U.S. Code) has undergone several major revisions, the last in 1976 as Public Law 94-553. According to Section 102 of the current law, copyright protection subsists

“in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now
known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or
otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.”

Fixed in a tangible medium of expression is a critical condition for copyright eligibility. The law thus covers any file you have created on your computer and either saved to disk or printed. It includes a work of art, a videotape or sound recording, a dramatic work, architectural drawings, your lecture notes, and even your vacation photos -- in other words, nearly any original expression that exists in a fixed form and can be perceived, reproduced, or communicated. Copyright protection does not extend to ideas themselves (only the expression of ideas), procedures, facts, principles, discoveries, titles, names, devices, machines, plans, slogans, familiar symbols, standard forms (such as blank checks, address books, and scorecards), and works consisting of common property (such as height and weight charts, common lists, and schedules), although some items in these categories may qualify for patent or trademark protection.

It is important to understand that the copyright law is a document in a perpetual state of change. The law was amended by Congress a total of 50 times between its enactment in 1976 and the end of 2002. (See the current list of amendments.) Typically, about two dozen copyright-related acts are introduced in each 2-year congressional session. (You can track the status of proposed copyright legislation online.) Most of these never become law, and of those that have survived the process and been enacted, few have been significant for the education community. However, some have. We will refer to these within this paper.

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