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Dan: Welcome to the Full Circle Resource Kit Podcast.

Our topic today is the ethical use of digital resources and our guest is Carol Simpson who is the Associate Professor of Library and Information Sciences at the University of North Texas. Carol has spoken and writes extensively on the topic of copyright. So, thank you for joining us today, Carol.

Carol: Well, thank you for inviting me.

Dan: It's great to have somone who has spent so much time writing, and thinking and speaking on this topic. What is the toughest copyright question that by educators and librarians as you are speaking and writing on this topic?

Carol: It's generally not a legal question, it's a background question - "why"? "Why can't I, I'm not making any money on this. It's for the good of the students" and so forth. That's probably the number one question, usually asked out of frustration.

Dan: And what is your response ?

Carol: Well, the response has to be that copyright was not enacted to serve teachers necessarily. Copyright was an economic law and if you look at it established from that viewpoint a lot of what goes on within copyright makes a lot of sense. The whole purpose in the Constitution, you know, was to promote the progess of science and the useful arts and the idea is to make it lucrative for inventors and writers and publishers and so forth to exploit their works. By giving them a limited monopoly on those works then that helps them.

But at the same time, we all know that knowledge builds on knowledge and so it is important that people be able to access the knowledge even during the period of the limited monopoly. And so it is a very fine balance that the courts have to maintain and sometimes it leans more one way and sometimes it leans more the other basically depending on who is on the Supreme Court at the moment.

Dan: So, how can we effectively teach ethical use of digital materials in the schools? What should we be saying to our students as we are in this reality now?

Carol: Well, there is kind of a dichotomy here. What teachers can do and what students can do is going to be very different. Students can pretty much use what they want within limits. Obviously there are the Multimedia Guidelines and those probably apply to what most of what students do today because it deals with anything that is PowerPoint-ish. It's going to Kid Pix and it's going to be Hyperstudio and it's going to be even to a limited degree mounting things on an intranet rather than the Internet.

And there are some rules in there that say, "OK, within these limits - and they are soft limits (30 seconds, well, OK, we're not going to put a stopwatch on it)". But students can pretty much use what they like as long as they attribute. There are some rules for attribution. But the idea is that students feel like if they don't say it themselves, their teacher isn't going to be happy. "It's not my idea, my teacher is not going to be happy." When in reality the teacher would be thrilled for the student to say, "John Doe says this", "Mary Smith says that" and "this is how all this works out". But at the same time the students don't understand that that's the appropriate way to do it. They feel like if they are not the ones saying it, they are somehow cheating.

Dan: So the dilemma there is that on the one hand we are trying to have students give attribution and at the same time we have the fear of plagiarism or trying to teach students not to plagiarize. How do you walk that fine line?

Carol: Exactly. Well, I once had a copyright attorney tell me that if you have an attribution and it's within, you know, it's not a huge amount, that you're perfectly OK. But if you don't attribute, even if you've changed the words a little bit or whatever, it's always a copyright violation. So not only have you plagiarized but you have also violated copyright.

But the idea is to start from the very beginning. When kids are doing Kid Pix. You know, in the Multimedia Guidelines there are a lot of discussions about documentation - how you have to document and that you must start at the beginning with a statement that says that "the material in this presentation may be borrowed under copyright law and that further use is prohibited" and so forth. I hear teachers say, "You know my second graders don't understand that". And I say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute." The law doesn't specify the wording, it just specifies the intent. And so a second grader can put on their project, "I used other people's stuff to create my project, please don't copy it." And a second grader can understand that.

Start early in doing attribution. You know, you don't have to do footnotes necessarily or textual notes. But just, in text attribution and let the students know, "It's OK to say 'somebody else said this'.

Dan:  So let's look at it now from the teacher perspective because you said there is a different scenario for them?

Carol: Exactly. Students get a lot of leeway because they copying that they are doing is for their personal use in education. Teachers are not doing it for personal use. Now, they are some provisions in copyright law that teachers can make one copy of a graphic or a book chapter or a poem or whatever and they can retain that in teaching and it doesn't say that that copy has to be on paper. It could be on transparency film. It could be in a Powerpoint presentation. So there is one copy that they may keep and retain to use.

But teachers are employees. So there are limitations on things like staff development. They don't get the educational exemptions for those kinds of things because they are not students, they are employees. Teachers have limits on multiple copying. Remember this is an economic law and the more multiple copies you make the fewer the publisher is going to sell. So, they have to walk the balance.

Dan:  The hard thing is that educators do often hear what they can't do and they may feel limited by that. So how do you balance that when you are talking with librarians or other people in the schools who have to deal with these issues on a daily basis?

Carol: What I tell the librarians - a lot of the librarians feel like they want to be the copyright cop because in some ways they are in the liability chain. They are providing the instrumentality for someone to violate copyright. And I say, "You know, all you can do is give them the information and document that you gave them the information and then go about your business." You can't be the person who is - ultimately the administrators are the ones who are going to be responsible and unfortunately they are the ones who know the least about copyright and the potential disasters that can happen in their schools.

I mean, look at what happened to Los Angeles Unified. They got caught with a bunch of illegal software in one small alternative high school and got fined $300,000, plus had to buy legal copies of all the software, plus attorney's fees. It was over $5 million. And you know, that $5 million that could have done a lot of good in education.

So, it's - librarians say, "Well, should I tell my principal if this is going on?" You know, I say, "If you were walking down the hall and you saw live electrical wires hanging out of the socket in the wall, would you tell your principal?" I said, you know there is probably less liability for that than there is for the copyright depending on what it is. So, I said, "Ya, you want to keep your administrator informed of what's going on and don't feel like you have to be a tattle-tale and name names, but just say, 'this situation is going on, this could be dangerous for all of us because we would be potentially personally liable.'"

Dan: Where would you direct a teacher if they wanted to really start to develop some lessons or resources for their students along these lines. What are some of the practical resources they can go to?

Carol: Oh golly. There are, Cyberbee put up by Linda Joseph in Columbus, Ohio has some really good student resources. Copyright Bay online is a source of student things. I did a kind of a checklist for kids that I have in my book. It's been published in my magazine and you can probably find it around online at various places.

Dan: Which book is that?

Carol: I wrote Copyright for Schools: A Practical Guide.

Dan: Well, thank you so much for chatting with us and just really getting our thinking going about this. You have given us some practical ideas on what educators can do, so I want to thank you for taking this time to interact with us.

Carol: Well, thank you very much.

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Dan:  This is a production of the 21st Century Information Fluency Project at the Illinois Math and Science Academy.