Week 9: Thing 23 - So, Just What is Fair Use?

I'm so glad to see that this last topic is included as one of our 23 Things. As I posted in my previous YouTube Thing, as much as we librarians can celebrate over Web 2.0 tools - it also makes our jobs much more complicated. With all the sharing and uploading and downloading and mashups and image generating...comes a great need to guide our school community to use these tools ethically. And just by visiting the many links on copyright and fair use, one can see that there certainly isn't one crystal-clear answer as to what you can and cannot use for educational purposes. And...what may be the case today, may very well change tomorrow. Put copyright and the internet together and you get one, big dynamic monster which will inevitably change forms over night.

One resource which I did find helpful in clarifying this complex issue, is Hall Davidson's Copyright Guidelines for Administrators which is posted on techLEARNING.com. It's a clear, easy-to-understand chart of various educational scenerios of fair use and copyright.

Oh, and how wonderfully ironic that the discovery excercise for California's School Library 23 Things was to find an "example or attribution that shows this program has been modified from it's original". Of course, one needs to look no further than our very own PA Library 2.0 Class - a work of Creative Commons in its very finest forms!