1 Copyright on the internet? Can’t I just use whatever I find online in my classes?
The issue of copyright and the internet is a murky area. Let’s say you need an image of a tiger to show your students in class. Why not just search Google Images, find what you want and then share it with your students? Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Although you may be able to use and share some images freely, others are copyrighted, and you need to get explicit permission from the creators (and, in some cases, pay something) to use them. If you go ahead and use these copyrighted images without doing so, you are technically breaking the law.
2 So how do I know what I can and can’t legally use?
Copyrighted work often has a © symbol or the words ‘copyright by’, to show that you cannot simply do what you like with it. This may sound scary and off-putting, but there is some good news for educators. Many works on the internet (documents and texts, images and photos, music and videos) have ‘Creative Commons’ licences. Creative Commons is a movement that enables creators to apply different kinds of licences to their work, allowing them to be distributed or freely shared for non-commercial purposes, adapted or remixed, or used only in their original version. Most creators like to have their work attributed to them, so this is usually a part of a Creative Commons licence. See the Creative Commons website (http://creativecommons.org) to explore the six types of licence currently in use, the logos used to identify each, and information on how to attribute material correctly.
3 How do I find material that has a Creative Commons licence?
Let’s go back to our image of a tiger. If you do a Google search, you will find lots of images, some clearly marked ‘copyright’, some not so clearly marked. Don’t assume that just because an image isn’t clearly marked as copyrighted, it isn’t. However, the good news is that if you use Google Advanced Search (www.google.com/advanced_image_ search), you can search for tiger images that only have Creative Commons licences, by selecting the usage rights you need as one of your search parameters. There is also a Creative Commons search engine (http://search.creativecommons.org/), where you can choose to search not just for images, but also for music or videos.
4 What if I want to use material with my students, but can’t find anything suitable with a Creative Commons licence?
There’s another handy concept for educators called ‘fair use’ (or ‘fair dealing’), which allows you to use a small percentage of copyrighted work without getting formal permission from the creator. Fair use is limited to a number of very specific uses: news reporting and commentary, criticism and parody, research and teaching. So let’s imagine you want to work on a chapter from a copyrighted book with your students. If this chapter is a small percentage of the total book (around five to ten percent is generally agreed to be the limit), then that’s fine, and you can even make multiple copies of this content for your students. But before you start photocopying everything in sight, beware! One of the limits to fair use is that the content cannot be used for commercial purposes. Now, if you teach in a private language school or university, where your students are paying for classes, this, it could be argued, is for commercial use. Fair use is very unclear on this point. And what about if you want to use a copyrighted image or video – the whole thing? It’s impossible to use a small percentage of an image. Especially if this image is going somewhere public – for example, on a class blog – it’s simply best to use a Creative Commons image instead (paying heed to the type of Creative Commons licence).
5 Should I tell my students about copyright?
Definitely. Knowing about copyright on the internet, and alternatives such as Creative Commons licences, is a fundamental part of being a digitally literate citizen who knows how to use the internet responsibly and legally. In fact, the classroom is the perfect place to let students of all ages know about this, especially if they need to find images, music or video for English language projects they are working on. This is the moment to teach them about Creative Commons, and help them to find (and attribute) appropriate images for their work. You, too, can model responsible behaviour by using Creative Commons images yourself (with the appropriate attribution). You could even create a class around Creative Commons, and share videos with your students (see http://creativecommons.org/videos/). And you can be proud of the fact that you are helping your students become more savvy internet users!
Nicky Hockly is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online teacher training and development consultancy. Her most recent book is Digital Literacies, published by Pearson. She has published an e-book, Webinars: A Cookbook for Educators (the-round.com), and is co-authoring Going Mobile, a book on mobile learning. She maintains a blog at www.emoderationskills.com.
