Unintended Consequences

Unintended Consequences

Imagine the following scenario:

A first-time instructor of a composition course needs to create a writing assignment for a rhetorical analysis essay.  He searches the internet and locates a MS Word document that another instructor has published to a department website.  The wording on the assignment is pretty much what the rookie instructor wants, so he downloads the document and only changes a few things here and there.  He then adds his own rubric.  Just to be safe, he adds an attribution tag in the document's footer, including the name of the original author, the URL, and the words "adapted from." 

Well, maybe nobody will ever find out, but this is a violation of the author's intellectual property rights. 

<Sigh.>

To the great displeasure of most educators, no meaningful discussion of copyright and fair use is possible without being inundated by complex if- and when-clauses.  A question may be phrased as yes/no, but far more than one word is usually necessary as an answer:

Q: "Can I photocopy a chapter of a copyrighted book and give it to my students?" 

A: "Yes, if you do it only once, had no other choice, and it's not the book's central content.  Be prepared to defend yourself."

And this is the kind of answer that makes a lot of educators HATE talking about copyright and fair use.  It is a headache.

Some questions, however, can be definitively answered:

Q: "Can I scan a chapter of a copyrighted book and post the .pdf to my faculty webpage for my students to access?"

A: "No."

Done.  That's that.  Correction: You "can" do that, you just can't do it lawfully.  Perhaps "should" would have been better in place of "can," but we think the point is made.

We've likely all engaged in a discussion of fair use at some point, and some of us might even think we get it.  That's great, but, when it comes to developing and sharing open educational resources, we have to think differently because, pretty much, fair use does not apply.  So what can we do?  This module is not about what you can and can't use in the classroom.  This module isn't even about what you can and can't use online.  This is about what you have to keep in mind when using and developing open resources.