Scenario:
Students are members of the Student Writers Association at a United States University, and their student group has a popular public Blog "The Court Jester" that is published on a weekly basis. This week they are putting together a political action piece that is critical of the University administration's Policy toward personal gender pronoun usage.
- The students have put together a blog posting that includes an edited video based upon an official University website news update containing a 30 minute video of the U. President making a statement about policy toward gender pronoun usage. The students copied and edited the video without asking for permission. The student video is a mash-up of clips of the president, funny animations that they made, and their own mocking sound effects and laughter. The students are poking fun at the U. President and policy with ridicule.
- In the student Blog entry they include a link to My.Pronouns,org https://www.mypronouns.org/what-and-why/ and they liked a image from this site, so a student saved and put a copy of the photo on their Blog header for this post. Later on in the same post the students inserted another photo from mypronouns.org by inserting it as a link to the original photo and adding a photo credit.
Questions (This is a multiple choice question with (1) one correct answer)
(1) Choose the correct statement about how the students used the University President's video on their blog.
(a) The students are violating copyright ownership because people always need to get prior written permission from the University to use the President's video.
[Incorrect] There are a number of cases in which you may fairly use copyrighted materials. In this case the video segments are used for political speech and making a parody of the original video.
(b) Even though the students used the copyrighted work by remixing a number of video segments, their intent was to make a parody of the original policy statement and to ridicule the President. The student's work is therefore transformational and has not violated copyright.
[Correct] When someone transforms the original video to create a new work of parody, and political speech, there are more liberal fair use exceptions to copyright. The student's use would likely be defendable if taken to court.
(
c) The students are in violation of copyright because they are plagiarizing the President's video.
[
Incorrect] The use of plagiarizing is sometimes confused with Copyright ownership, but is in fact not as much a legal definition, as a moral one, whereby the intent is deceit to portray someone's ideas and expressions as your own without attribution.
(d) Because the President's video first appeared on a website, it is now on the internet and can be freely used and shared any way the student's want to.
[
Incorrect] simply because content is available on the internet through a web browser does not make it free and public domain. There are a number of protections under copyright and licensing that limit the use of materials.
(1) Choose the True statement about how the students used the images from mypronouns.com in their Blog.
(a) The students are free to copy and paste the images, because they are digital and from a website that is publicly available on the internet.
[
Incorrect] simply because content is in a digital format, or available on the internet through a web browser does not make it free and public domain. There are a number of protections under copyright and licensing that limit the use of materials. Copying of the image onto their own Blog site is still making a copy of something.
(b) The students can use the images on their Blog, because as students, the use is educational and is not generating any profit.
[
Incorrect] Because something is being used by students does not necessarily make it educational fair use, nor is making a profit or not the only determinant factor.
(c) The use of the image by embedding a link to the originally posted picture on the website and captioning a photo credit is acceptable use.
[
Correct] Because in this case, the image has not been copied to the student's Blog server, in the US, although controversial, this is generally not considered a direct violation of copyright. It is also good that the students attributed the source of the image to the photographer.
(d) All of the images used by the students on their blog violate copyright.
[
Incorrect] There are acceptable uses of web-based images that can be linked to websites and blogs. Care needs to be taken to examine the author's intent (i,e, CC BY-NC-SA) if they have used Creative Commons licensing, their copyright ownership or statements about linking and re-use on their website.
Attribution-ShareAlike
CC BY-SA
