Black Hawk Elementary Media Center

Copyright
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"If you cannot protect what you own, you don't own anything." - Jack Valenti, former president of the Motion Picture Association of America, 2002

For Students

Copyright for Students. Visit the Cyber Bee site to learn about copyright for students. This is an interactive classroom where you can find out about copyright, fair use, and public domain, and learn how to use videos/photos/songs in student projects.
 

For Teacher and Parents

  • United States Copyright Office The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 gives the copyright owner exclusive rights to his or her published or unpublished works.
  • A Visit to Copyright BayThis is a visual copyright tutorial available from the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. The Background Beach will give you background on the Copyright Law of 1976.
  • What is Fair Use? This is an article from the American Library Association with an explanation of Fair Use, which was added as section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. ALA explains that this section was not meant to be specific. This section does not give any numerical guidelines for quantities of materials of length of time they may be used. 
  • The Fair Use Guide for Educational Multimedia This is an interpretation of Fair Use by a groups of over 20 organizations and professional association who agreed upon fair use interpretations for multimedia in 1996. It provides suggestions of numerical quantities of intellectual property that may reasonably be used with appropriate citations of sources. See guidelines 5.3 and 6.4 for discussion of what is reasonable for web sites versus other mediums.