Copyright Scenarios


Common Copyright Scenarios

**This wiki is for educational purposes.  The responses/answers to these scenarios were not written by copyright experts and

should not be viewed as authoritative**


Click to respond to the Scenarios. 

 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 1 

A teacher has recently started using PowerPoint lectures in his classes. To keep the presentations lively, he likes to include hip hop music in the presentations, and he sometimes includes current photos from the news.  Sometimes the teacher would like to make changes to the music and pictures in order to try to make a point, but he's not sure if he should. 

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 2

A teacher has found an article in a journal that is particularly useful for a class she teaches every semester. She would like to include the article as a reading assignment this semester, and then again next time she teaches the course.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 3

A teacher records a segment of the evening news on her home VCR and shows the recording the next day in class. Afterwards, she selects a two minute clip from the segment and burns it onto a DVD for future classroom presentations.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 4

A school's library holds several older VHS videocassettes that are used regularly for classroom presentations. The videos are no longer available commercially in either VHS or DVD formats.  The librarian wants to create a compilation of clips by converting segments of the VHS tapes to digital form and burning them onto DVD for use in classroom lectures.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 5

For an assignment, a student is writing a paper on the influence of Bob Dylan on American pop music.  In this article, she quotes lines from several of his songs. Is this a fair use of the song lyrics, or does she need to seek permission to use the material?  What if the paper is published in the local music magazine?

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 6

A school is producing a website. Students have found several graphics on other websites that they would like to include on their site. The original source is being given credit. 

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 7

As part of an assignment, students are required to create a PowerPoint to present to their class.  Some of them want to use copyrighted material for either background or to accompany a particular frame in their presentations.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 8 

A groups of students have produced a school presentation accompanied by playing background music directly from the original source CD. The presentation is video taped for transmission over the local, cable access channel.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 9 

A department head gathers samples of student work to portray "A" type work, "B" type work, etc. She eliminates the students' names, then duplicates and disseminates these examples to teachers.  Some teachers, in turn, distribute the examples to students.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 10 

The after-school program shows videos that have been purchased with school funds and are included in a the media center's video collection. The programs are used for entertainment and informal education, but there is no formal lesson plan.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 11 

Students in a web design class have been given an assignment to make a personal website. Timmy Thompson, a student in the class, loves snowboarding and wants to put some snowboarding pictures on his personal site. The only problem is that he doesn't have any good pictures of himself. So, Timmy searches for snowboarding images a search engine and finds a site with a number of good pictures he would like to use. He looks everywhere on the site, but doesn't see anything written that says the images are protected by copyright. Timmy downloads a few of the images and uses them on his personal website on the hobbies page.  Under each picture he cites the source of the image.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 12 

Students have been instructed to create a display or website about their favorite place. The teacher warned the students that points will be deducted from their final score if he finds any copyright violations. Not wanting to jeapordize his grade, Timmy Thompson gets his parents to drive him to his favorite place and takes pictures to use on his website. When students present their finished projects to the class, Timmy notices that Susie Simpson has used a bunch of pictures on her website that he knows must have been taken by a professional photographer. She didn't even site the source of the images. Timmy complains to the teacher that he thinks Susie used copyrighted images on her website. Susie defends herself, claiming that she got the images off of a U.S. government website and was allowed to use the images without restrictions because they were in the public domain.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 13 

As a final project, students have been tasked with creating a website for a local business in the community. Timmy Thompson picks his aunt's restuarant since he knows that she doesn't have a website already. While searching the Internet for ideas, Timmy comes across a stock photography website that has some really good close up pictures of different types of food. These images would be perfect for his project, so Timmy reads the usage restrictions for the images. Timmy is excited when he reads that the images require payment for commercial use, but are offered free for not-for profit or educational use. Since he is doing the project for a school assignment, Timmy downloads the images and uses them in his project. Timmy completes the final website and receives praise from everyone, including his aunt and Mr. Johnson, about how nice the site looks.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 14 

A teacher comes to class with a stack of papers to hand out. It turns out that the teacher had made several dozen copies, one for each student in the class, of a published article.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 15

While her class is studying classical music, a music teacher uploads a song from a CD to her teacher website so that students can listen to it.  The students like it so much, they ask her to upload the whole CD.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 16 

The owner of the local video store supports the school by donating one rental-free video to the school every Friday. The video is shown in the multi-purpose room to reward students with perfect attendance that week.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 17 

A history teacher taped the original ABC news report showing Richard Nixon leaving the White House after he resigned. She made it at home on her personal VCR and used her own tape. She uses the entire news program every year in her classroom. 

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 18

A teacher rents Gone With the Wind to show the burning of Atlanta scene to her class while studying the Civil War.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 19 

A student doing a multimedia report discovers how to copy the QuickTime movie of Kennedy's "We shall go to the moon" speech from a CD-ROM encyclopedia. He presents the report to his classmates.  Then the teacher posts the projects on the school LAN.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 20 

A student finds a photo online dramatizing a pre-Columbian Viking landing in America. Since the school symbol is the Viking, he uses this photo as a graphic element on the school's Web page--giving credit to the site from which it was copied.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 21 

A science teacher asks the school librarian to record a great episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy. He figures he'll use it for a couple of years.


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 22 

A student building a multimedia art project uses copyrighted images of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings downloaded from the Web. He submits this project to a multimedia competition honoring classroom work and wins a prize for the school.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 23 

The teacher of the winning multimedia project mentioned above shows it at an art conference for educators. It cost $50 to attend the conference and the he teacher is awarded free attendance because he is a presenter.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 24 

A high school video class produces a student video yearbook that they sell at community events to raise money for equipment for the school. They use well-known popular music clips. The money all goes to the school and the songs are fully listed in the credits.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 25 

A middle school transcribes the lyrics from the album "Cats" and puts it on as the school mini-musical. A teacher plays the music by ear on the piano, and the students perform every song. There is no admission charge.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 26 

You are producing a website for your political science class. You find a political cartoon on the Web that is a perfect illustration of the divisive nature of a two-party political system. You capture the cartoon and place it on your website.

 


 

Click Here to Respond to Scenario 27 

As part of a social studies assignment, students have been required to create PowerPoint presentations to present to their classes. Some of them want to use copyrighted music for either background or to accompany a particular frame in their presentation.

 


 

The above scenarios are taken from or derived from scenarios at the following sites:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/copyinfo/scenarios/cat_all.html

http://www.washington.edu/accessit/webdesign/student/unit4/module1/copyright_scenarios.htm

http://copyrightnews.blogspot.com/2006/12/scenarios-3.html

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/p/peachj/edte230/copyright/quiz.htm

http://plagiarism.umf.maine.edu/copyright/copy_infrin.html