15 Copyright Rules Every Student (and Teacher) Should Know...

Melissa Venable over at the Online Colleges blog, posted a nicely accessible list of copyright rules everybody (students AND teachers) should know.

Click on the image above to go to the full post.

Take a careful look at #5 - You can sample from DVDs, even circumventing copyright protection as this is one of the less well known fair use exemptions granted by the Librarian of Congress in 2010. Note that currently many take the wording in the Librarian of Congress' exception to mean that circumventing copyright applies only to university faculty and film and media students, but there has been discussion about extending this fair use safe harbor to K-12.

• This is a list intended for an audience of adult online learners. Please don't tell students that they can "rip DVDs with abandon..." 

You may also want to take a close look at #8 - If your project becomes commercial, you no longer have protection as a student and at #9 - If your project reaches a wider audience, you’re not protected either as these aspects of copyright and fair use that may come into play in some forms of presentations of learning or when students' online blogs or videos are published to the web.

We maintain an Image and Sound Resources page to help you and your students access copyright-friendly images, copyright-friendly sound files, and tools to make using them a bit easier. The page is linked both the Middle School and High School portals under the tab labeled Helpful Things.