The Guide to Teaching
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Using Newspapers in the Classroom
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 22:48:47 -0600 (CST)
From: Wade Riddick <riddick@mail.la.utexas.edu>
In response to "Patrick H. O'Neil" <poneil@ups.edu> on copyright:
To be picky, even forwarding email can be considered a copyright violation
under the international Berne Convention which the US only recently signed
on to. Of course, several parts of the Berne Convention are not
compatible with US law, so where things stand is anybody's guess.
Browsing and fair use guidelines have themselves changed substantially in
the last year due to international negotiations. If you do, in fact, have
permission from the publisher or from a clearing house of some sort you're
on good ground.
But scanning existing reserve or library materials and making them
available to students who could otherwise access them by walking into the
library is entirely different than visiting the CNN web site, downloading
the text of an article and emailing it to a hundred of your students. Fair
use would certainly apply to quoting part of it in a paper or publication
but it's not so clear with respect to other applications. Lawyers have
been fighting over this pretty fiercely for the last four or five years.
And I wouldn't at all say that it's slim odds you might not later face
some sort of restriction on whose sites you can link to from your own web
site, especially when you consider that the two companies involved in this
dispute - Microsoft and Ticketmaster - have plenty of money to hire plenty
of more lawyers.
In the end, you're safest if you remember Pascal's famous bet on religion.
Pascal said he believe in God because it didn't cost him anything. If he
was wrong, so what? But if he was right and bet the other way, he was in
for some considerable trouble after he died. When it comes to copyrights,
we're all better off believing there *isn't* a God. So if you can send
the URL instead of the article, do it. It costs you nothing and avoids
plenty of potential nastiness.
This issue may seem silly to a lot of people but, frankly, you should see
how silly some of the proposed changes are that they're still considering.
Ask any school's legal counsel. It's been a rancorous debate to say the
least. (Up until last year there was a good shot that the law would be
redefined to make all web browsing some form of copyright violation.)
If you're interested, I'd encourage you to look at many of the materials
you can find on the web.
Wade Riddick
University of Texas
riddick@jeeves.la.utexas.edu
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