A Mickey Mouse operation circa 1928

This week I've been reviewing copyright and licensing. I have also been reading about the obligations we as educators have to both correctly attribute authorship, as well as to conform to any licensing agreements (or lack thereof) when utilizing works in education materials.

As I've mentioned before, I work as an instructional designer and work closely with faculty. One of the things they often complain about are the hoops they must jump through in order to publish their materials to a course pack, specifically the annual copyright review of their course materials. I have been asked more than once why they can’t simply claim “Fair Use” with the materials they reference, and be done with it. Before this week, I knew that the law related to Fair Use was nuanced and wasn’t as simple as saying “I’m using this for education.” But I now have a swath of easy to understand resources to point these faculty to in hopes of clarifying the multiple considerations of Fair Use and copyright-protected works.

As an exercise, I put together my own video explaining copyright and the use of creative commons-licensed works, which is embedded below. I hope this video will help my colleagues better understand copyright and how licensing works. I will use this alongside some of my university library's licensing resources.

Additionally, I plan to reference this funny video (and I recommend you watch it) as a faculty development resource to further highlight why copyright matters, and the invaluable service our university library provides to us by reviewing our course materials and identifying any potential failures to conform to our licensing agreements.

As a closing note, check out this short video related to how we got to our current state related to copyright protected works.

References:

Copyright Clearance Center. (2011, February 11). Copyright on campus with Jane the librarian [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/2UWaQK5Wbvs

Elmer, Stephen. (2022, July 17). Copyright and Creative Commons licensing [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/Ol28SaErcLo

Tech Insider. (2015, October 3). Mickey Mouse and copyright law [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/_6u7JkQAFMw